10 ms·

Apple is not your friend

113 points by kgraves 7y ago

akmarinov 7y ago
No company is your friend, they just want your money.
- danieldk 7y ago
  There are a lot of mom and pop shops, which just do what is their passion and they want their customers to be happy. Money is just a means to support themselves. E.g. I frequented a lot of local record shops and it was clear that their owners did not want to get rich. They would talk to you for 15-30 minutes about bands and new releases, even if you just bought one record with a < 1 Euro profit margin. They just loved music and they enjoyed customers that loved music. No profit-driven company is your friend. When it's about profit, money becomes the end.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    How many of these mom and pop shops are 'venture-funded'? that's the point I think he's making. Venture funding and selling out takes all the passion out of the business and makes it into a greedy Mr. Burn's style enterprise. Edit: Let me add -- just look at what happened w/ WhatsApp. The guys who sold it to Zuck n co, regret it fully but can't take it back. They know they sold their souls to satan, and at least now they're outspoken against the turn Whatsapp took, though a bit late and a few pay-days past.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  I see where you are coming from but there's a scale-aspect to this. These entities aren't traditional companies, like your local newsagent or plumber or whatever. They've reached a level that they can influence governments and can control entire populations (to a degree). They have immense power and can effectively wield it as they please to further their own ends. They are related to small local companies only as they have to file a tax return... that's about it!
- yitchelle 7y ago
  In reality, no providers of service or product that you depend on are your friend. Extend these ideals to food providers, medical services, etc...Agreed that the choices of providers are little bit wider, but still the ideals are the same.
- crb912 7y ago
  No permanent friends, only permanent interests.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Of course no company is a friend. But there are businesses, who take their customer serious and more importantly, act with integrity, and treat you accordingly.
saagarjha 7y ago
Based on the linked content, a better title might be "No venture-capital-funded startup, no billion or trillion dollar corporation is your friend."
ohduran 7y ago
Capitalism is founded on the idea that the consumer is a means to an end. Apple, Google, Facebook, etc, can do as they please insofar as they keep creating value to their shareholders. Which is another way of saying "if you don't like my garden, get the hell out of it!".
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Capitalism is founded on the idea that if we let everyone focus on making money for themselves however they like, the emergent feedback loops will sort things out and we'll have a world where everyone's needs are met. In the past two or three centuries we've identified a lot of ways in which this turns out wrong. There's a kernel of a really good idea in there, true, but it also needs a lot of tuning.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Agreed, but "tuning" is an understatement. Capitalism worked well when most businesses were local and being a large, successful company meant employing a lot of people from the same communities as your customers. This proximity is largely responsible for that emergent feedback loop. Today, many businesses can become exceptionally profitable with relatively few employees. And they can treat those few employees as poorly as the market can bear because 99% of your customers don't live anywhere near them. And those forces of change are still as strong as ever. Technology and automation is speeding up change in the economy faster than ever before. Maybe there'll always be enough work for full employment, but maybe not—and the pace of change is now far too fast for human capital to keep up.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- oska 7y ago
  > Capitalism is founded on the idea that the consumer is a means to an end. No it's not, and repeating such myths only helps abet companies who act in such a way.
  - 7y ago
_Understated_ 7y ago
I've fallen for these mega-corp's marketing bullshit many times over the years: It's easy done! It's also easy to forget that they only care about appeasing shareholders and the way to do that is to make money. At any cost! I am currently working on a (personal) .NET Core project so I'm using Windows 10 but when it's up and running I am going to spend some serious time looking into Linux instead and developing my .NET core stuff there. I'm also waiting for the Librem 5 now: All other phones are thinly-veiled spyware as far as I am concerned. *takes off rose-tinted glasses! Edit: changed focus from Apple to mega-corps instead
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  I'm not really a .net person, I'm mostly php w/ some nodejs/golang/elixir but I tried .net and tooling and things at least work now on arch linux where I don't think they would've 5-10 years ago. Apple's imho one of the worst players, they have the most closed ecosystem imaginable it should be illegal to require a developer to buy your hardware just to develop apps on your platform. I'll never support or use an apple unless mandated by a client and they'll need to supply the hardware. Google's bad too but at least I can side-load apps and install custom rom's easily enough.
  - orloffm 7y ago
    They don't actually work on Arch - it's the only distro without official .NET Core SDK package, and the community-provided version has too many issues (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state_of_net_core_on_arch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...). Not sure if there is 3.0 SDK yet.
- m0xte 7y ago
  I would walk away from .Net Core as well. Microsoft have proven themselves on several occasions that they don't give a crap about the end user. The whole default opt-in telemetry nightmare of .Net core is an example. The final result of the discussion was a "fuck you, we're still doing it" and nothing more. Also getting support on anything is now basically "it's open source, raise a ticket we'll never fix". And not to mention the insane versioning, churn and schizophrenic direction changes. Same old corporation. They just worked out how to label customers as consumers and pacify the userbase by putting it on GitHub instead of Connect and reducing the support availability (have you tried getting desktop support, even paid per incident on windows 10? Don't bother!) For me a software ecosystem has to stand 100% alone for me to invest in it. That basically leaves Python and C at this point which I'm honestly not that unhappy with.
rekabis 7y ago
However, out of that list of four, Apple is the one that I have seen being “least evil” with me and my data. Google dropped their “don’t be evil” motto for a very damn good reason, and the safety of their own app marketplace is a fucking joke. Facebook is even worse than Google, in that it has never stopped trying to appear innocent of wrongdoing while paddling like mad under the surface. Microsoft… has gone all Spyware with _all_ of their products as of late, although at least their business-class stuff is moderately neutered. Apple may Hoover up some data, but it does at least employ actual security and privacy in many places. They make stands where it makes sense to take stands, and they bend in the wind where the hurricane would snap a stiffer branch. Finally, their walled garden - although not perfect - is far safer than any other one out there. They make missteps just like any other entity run by humans, but a fair number of their actions do point in the correct direction. If given no alternative choice that is evil-free, I will chose the least evil option as my vote. Apple it is, at least for all my personal devices.
- jeen02 7y ago
  You really think Google dropped their motto for a damn good reason? Really?
- mda 7y ago
  Your argument is flawed. How do you know that Apple protects personal data better than others? I think it has the least experience and probably Google is the best in that area. Microsoft is maybe second.
  - myrandomcomment 7y ago
    Apple makes money on their HW and their media sales and application sales. You have to spend the money by choice for Apple to make money. What does most of the world pay Google for? At Google you are the product. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand. The same goes for FB.
    - megous 7y ago
      Just because you pay for something doesn't make the incentives to screw you over to get even more money go away. Does it? Various user-blaming shenanigans, when Apple messes up their HW design can serve as an example. "You're holding it wrong", "You're putting the phone in your pocket", "You're using keyboard wrong in a real world with dust and stuff", etc.
zapzupnz 7y ago
Apple mightn't be your friend, it's true, but it's not as though they're blocking the web app version of this which has been available to any device from day 1. I'm not stating this to defend Apple, whose decision I also find questionable (although relatively consistent with some other rejected/pulled apps, like the one for locating and avoiding alcohol-testing checkpoints), but rather to give us all a bit of perspective — the same information remains available and usable via a web app, probably the better place for it anyway as then no store front can limit it.
- dannyr 7y ago
  Apple intentionally held back mobile web that companies cannot build mobile web apps that are as capable as native apps. So this is partly why we're all at the mercy of walled garden App Stores.
  - soraminazuki 7y ago
    > Apple intentionally held back mobile web that companies cannot build mobile web apps that are as capable as native apps. Are you suggesting that random websites should have the same level of access to your device as native apps?
    - dannyr 7y ago
      Web apps! See original comment. Web apps that can ask permission to access features of your phone like a native app. There are Progressive Web Apps now that are decent like Twitter's but it's still not as good as a native app.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Well... it's kind of a catch-22 though. If we all agree that it's good for web apps to be less capable than native apps, then we shouldn't be using the open availability of web apps as an excuse for censoring native apps. There's a lot of stuff this app can't do as a web-app that it can do as a native app. There's a faction of HN that wants to the web to be for read-only documents, and there's a faction of HN that wants the web to be an open, device-agnostic distribution platform for politically risky apps that Apple would otherwise lock off of its devices. But it can't be both. Those two factions often end up talking past each other. It's a very difficult balance.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jeswin 7y ago
I have a lot of privacy concerns with Google. But they have also enabled my phone to run on mostly Open Source code, both OS and applications. This is important to me, and for that reason I bunch them apart from Apple and MS.
- paulcarroty 7y ago
  > mostly Open Source code, both OS and applications. It's not true. Without closed kernel drivers and closed-source Play Store/Youtube/Pay apps any Android is just piece of plastic.
  - Yetanfou 7y ago
    The device drivers can be a problem on many devices, even when running AOSP-derived distributions many of these are lifted from a stock distribution and used as blobs. The bit about Android needing Play Store/Youtube/Pay apps is not true though, I do not have any of these on any of my devices which continue to work just fine - I'd go so far as to say that they work better without these parts: battery consumption goes down markedly, privacy invasion goes down tremendously. I might not be getting the 'Android experience' as Google intends but seeing as I do not want that anyway I don't see this as a negative.
    - paulcarroty 7y ago
      > can be a problem on many devices Can you provide a one 100% working Android device with open drivers?
      - Yetanfou 7y ago
        Replicant [1, 2] supports 13 (older) devices. As to whether they are 100% working depends on what you intend to use the device for given that some functions (e.g. GPS) are not supported. If you're genuinely interested in this subject a search for blob-free android will give more results, also pointing out alternatives like PostmarketOS and Librem which are not Android-based but (in the case of PostmarketOS) can run on Android hardware [3]. [1] https://www.replicant.us/ https://www.replicant.us/ [2] https://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php https://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php [3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Fnoord 7y ago
Not sure about how newsworthy this is, as it seems rather obvious and is based on different newsworthy sources. By itself, it is not high of content though. Still, discussion about this issue is worth it. Given the author's other post on Twitter > In the 1930s and 40s, Thomas J. Watson’s IBM punch-card mainframes helped Hitler perpetrate the Holocaust. > Imagine what IBM Watson can help dictators achieve today with AI. (Apart from having to think about China's credit score system about which a Black Mirror episode is devoted already.) This made me think of the tangent of the book IBM and the Holocaust [1] which is still on my to read list. AFAIK, in my country (NL) IBM's machines were used to sort based on religion [2]. It is a major historical reason why one's religion is nowadays consider PII. Of course, it is easy to check is someone regularly buys kosher or halal meat at the grocery store... Data is a ticking time bomb. Or, as Bruce Schneier wrote in an essay, "data is a toxic asset." [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_subsidiaries_of_IBM#The_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_subsidia... [3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...
hewrin10 7y ago
Why do people expect Apple to be their friend?
- tumetab1 7y ago
  There was a recent trend, since mid 00's, that some organizations have the world best interest at heart.
tomashubelbauer 7y ago
Off topic for this particular submission but on topic for Twitter submissions in general: is anyone else rate limited like 90 % of the time when accessing Twitter using the mobile browser on mobile data? Maybe it is because I'm signed out of Twitter in Safari, but I can't read most of the tweets and threads posted to HN.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  El just get a “unable to load” in the twitter page (or similar message). It goes away if I just reload the page... ?
  - tomashubelbauer 7y ago
    Unfortunately for me no amount of reloading fixes it. When it works, it is for no obvious reason except that maybe I got lucky and other users on the same CGNAT my cell service provider is using weren't using Twitter for a while so it's my turn in the Twitters IP white list.
- janpot 7y ago
  Yes, me, I always have to tap my way out of some nagging dialogs that ask me to log in, or download the app. Then I'm rate limited. I then have to go back and click the link again before I can view it. 100% of the time.
- song 7y ago
  I've never ever clicked on a twitter link on my mobile phone and seen anything else than the rate limited message. Only way to get around it is to check "Request Desktop Site" but that's an annoying workaround. Never understood how such a major website could be this broken.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  Use a different browser, something like Privacy Browser [1] which enables custom Javascript/referer/cookie/etc. settings. For Twitter I tend to block anything and everything which makes it revert to its non-JS page. Enabling Javascript gives the normal page without all those popups and app nags. I have never been rate limited. I am a passive Twitter reader since I do not have an account there so for me this solution works, I do not know whether it is possible to actually post anything on that site in this manner. [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....
ensiferum 7y ago
Business aligns itself with money. It's just that simple.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drukenemo 7y ago
How could a company ever be the friend of somebody? That's silly from the get-go.
Upvoter33 7y ago
Sadly, in relation to this, governments could be your friend. A good government could stand up for the "right" thing instead of the thing that makes money. But somehow, large subsets of the population have been convinced that government is inherently evil. Companies exist to make money; why would anyone think differently?
- thrower123 7y ago
  Government is never your friend. It's a bandit that's too big for you to stare down, shaking you down for money every time you turn around.
TwoNineA 7y ago
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
- rvz 7y ago
  Yes, Aral Balkan has at it for years and appears to be the heir-apparent to Richard Stallman's ethics and principles.
hrbf 7y ago
When did people begin to think that corporations of any kind could be their friends? Did they even? Or is this just another tantrum by yet another man-baby? I don’t want to be rude here, just wondering. Also: given the point is valid, isn’t this largely preaching to the choir? Or is this a predominantly American thing? I’m genuinely interested.
panpanna 7y ago
Comments here summarized in one sentence: Google/Microsoft/Facebook are a bunch of horrible companies, ergo, Apple is good.
- DavideNL 7y ago
  I would summarise it as: Google/Microsoft/Facebook are a bunch of horrible companies, Apple is least bad.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    It starts like that and the further down the threads you go the more it moves toward praising apple for this and that No problem with that, but why does every single post criticizing apple for something end up this way??
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Which is still broadly missing the point. What the tweet says: "None of these major companies are your friend. Some are better than others, but none of them, when push comes to shove, care about you." How HN is responding: "But Apple's still technically the best amoral company, right? I mean, if we're gonna rank them. Let's rank them." I agree that people need to be pragmatic about the companies they interact with. Realistically, very few people are going to cut the entirety of FAANG out of their lives, so ranking has some value. But don't let ranking companies get in the way of recognizing that when push comes to shove, even the least bad companies will still throw you under a bus for a buck. That's all the tweet was saying -- recognize that Apple is also an amoral company. Be pragmatic, not loyal. The people on here setting up company tiers are missing that point.
dang 7y ago
This submission has no content. Please do better than that. An OP needs to have interesting information for the reader to process—otherwise we get lame and tedious discussions that we've all heard before. In short: more fiber less sugar. Some sugar is ok, but not only. Indignation counts as sugar.

113 points by kgraves 7y ago

akmarinov 7y ago

No company is your friend, they just want your money.

danieldk 7y ago
There are a lot of mom and pop shops, which just do what is their passion and they want their customers to be happy. Money is just a means to support themselves. E.g. I frequented a lot of local record shops and it was clear that their owners did not want to get rich. They would talk to you for 15-30 minutes about bands and new releases, even if you just bought one record with a < 1 Euro profit margin. They just loved music and they enjoyed customers that loved music. No profit-driven company is your friend. When it's about profit, money becomes the end.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  How many of these mom and pop shops are 'venture-funded'? that's the point I think he's making. Venture funding and selling out takes all the passion out of the business and makes it into a greedy Mr. Burn's style enterprise. Edit: Let me add -- just look at what happened w/ WhatsApp. The guys who sold it to Zuck n co, regret it fully but can't take it back. They know they sold their souls to satan, and at least now they're outspoken against the turn Whatsapp took, though a bit late and a few pay-days past.
_Understated_ 7y ago
I see where you are coming from but there's a scale-aspect to this. These entities aren't traditional companies, like your local newsagent or plumber or whatever. They've reached a level that they can influence governments and can control entire populations (to a degree). They have immense power and can effectively wield it as they please to further their own ends. They are related to small local companies only as they have to file a tax return... that's about it!
yitchelle 7y ago
In reality, no providers of service or product that you depend on are your friend. Extend these ideals to food providers, medical services, etc...Agreed that the choices of providers are little bit wider, but still the ideals are the same.
crb912 7y ago
No permanent friends, only permanent interests.
_ph_ 7y ago
Of course no company is a friend. But there are businesses, who take their customer serious and more importantly, act with integrity, and treat you accordingly.

saagarjha 7y ago

Based on the linked content, a better title might be "No venture-capital-funded startup, no billion or trillion dollar corporation is your friend."

ohduran 7y ago

Capitalism is founded on the idea that the consumer is a means to an end. Apple, Google, Facebook, etc, can do as they please insofar as they keep creating value to their shareholders. Which is another way of saying "if you don't like my garden, get the hell out of it!".

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Capitalism is founded on the idea that if we let everyone focus on making money for themselves however they like, the emergent feedback loops will sort things out and we'll have a world where everyone's needs are met. In the past two or three centuries we've identified a lot of ways in which this turns out wrong. There's a kernel of a really good idea in there, true, but it also needs a lot of tuning.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Agreed, but "tuning" is an understatement. Capitalism worked well when most businesses were local and being a large, successful company meant employing a lot of people from the same communities as your customers. This proximity is largely responsible for that emergent feedback loop. Today, many businesses can become exceptionally profitable with relatively few employees. And they can treat those few employees as poorly as the market can bear because 99% of your customers don't live anywhere near them. And those forces of change are still as strong as ever. Technology and automation is speeding up change in the economy faster than ever before. Maybe there'll always be enough work for full employment, but maybe not—and the pace of change is now far too fast for human capital to keep up.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
oska 7y ago
> Capitalism is founded on the idea that the consumer is a means to an end. No it's not, and repeating such myths only helps abet companies who act in such a way.
- 7y ago

_Understated_ 7y ago

I've fallen for these mega-corp's marketing bullshit many times over the years: It's easy done! It's also easy to forget that they only care about appeasing shareholders and the way to do that is to make money. At any cost! I am currently working on a (personal) .NET Core project so I'm using Windows 10 but when it's up and running I am going to spend some serious time looking into Linux instead and developing my .NET core stuff there. I'm also waiting for the Librem 5 now: All other phones are thinly-veiled spyware as far as I am concerned. *takes off rose-tinted glasses! Edit: changed focus from Apple to mega-corps instead

gremlinsinc 7y ago
I'm not really a .net person, I'm mostly php w/ some nodejs/golang/elixir but I tried .net and tooling and things at least work now on arch linux where I don't think they would've 5-10 years ago. Apple's imho one of the worst players, they have the most closed ecosystem imaginable it should be illegal to require a developer to buy your hardware just to develop apps on your platform. I'll never support or use an apple unless mandated by a client and they'll need to supply the hardware. Google's bad too but at least I can side-load apps and install custom rom's easily enough.
- orloffm 7y ago
  They don't actually work on Arch - it's the only distro without official .NET Core SDK package, and the community-provided version has too many issues (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state_of_net_core_on_arch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...). Not sure if there is 3.0 SDK yet.
m0xte 7y ago
I would walk away from .Net Core as well. Microsoft have proven themselves on several occasions that they don't give a crap about the end user. The whole default opt-in telemetry nightmare of .Net core is an example. The final result of the discussion was a "fuck you, we're still doing it" and nothing more. Also getting support on anything is now basically "it's open source, raise a ticket we'll never fix". And not to mention the insane versioning, churn and schizophrenic direction changes. Same old corporation. They just worked out how to label customers as consumers and pacify the userbase by putting it on GitHub instead of Connect and reducing the support availability (have you tried getting desktop support, even paid per incident on windows 10? Don't bother!) For me a software ecosystem has to stand 100% alone for me to invest in it. That basically leaves Python and C at this point which I'm honestly not that unhappy with.

rekabis 7y ago

However, out of that list of four, Apple is the one that I have seen being “least evil” with me and my data. Google dropped their “don’t be evil” motto for a very damn good reason, and the safety of their own app marketplace is a fucking joke. Facebook is even worse than Google, in that it has never stopped trying to appear innocent of wrongdoing while paddling like mad under the surface. Microsoft… has gone all Spyware with _all_ of their products as of late, although at least their business-class stuff is moderately neutered. Apple may Hoover up some data, but it does at least employ actual security and privacy in many places. They make stands where it makes sense to take stands, and they bend in the wind where the hurricane would snap a stiffer branch. Finally, their walled garden - although not perfect - is far safer than any other one out there. They make missteps just like any other entity run by humans, but a fair number of their actions do point in the correct direction. If given no alternative choice that is evil-free, I will chose the least evil option as my vote. Apple it is, at least for all my personal devices.

jeen02 7y ago
You really think Google dropped their motto for a damn good reason? Really?
mda 7y ago
Your argument is flawed. How do you know that Apple protects personal data better than others? I think it has the least experience and probably Google is the best in that area. Microsoft is maybe second.
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  Apple makes money on their HW and their media sales and application sales. You have to spend the money by choice for Apple to make money. What does most of the world pay Google for? At Google you are the product. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand. The same goes for FB.
  - megous 7y ago
    Just because you pay for something doesn't make the incentives to screw you over to get even more money go away. Does it? Various user-blaming shenanigans, when Apple messes up their HW design can serve as an example. "You're holding it wrong", "You're putting the phone in your pocket", "You're using keyboard wrong in a real world with dust and stuff", etc.

zapzupnz 7y ago

Apple mightn't be your friend, it's true, but it's not as though they're blocking the web app version of this which has been available to any device from day 1. I'm not stating this to defend Apple, whose decision I also find questionable (although relatively consistent with some other rejected/pulled apps, like the one for locating and avoiding alcohol-testing checkpoints), but rather to give us all a bit of perspective — the same information remains available and usable via a web app, probably the better place for it anyway as then no store front can limit it.

dannyr 7y ago
Apple intentionally held back mobile web that companies cannot build mobile web apps that are as capable as native apps. So this is partly why we're all at the mercy of walled garden App Stores.
- soraminazuki 7y ago
  > Apple intentionally held back mobile web that companies cannot build mobile web apps that are as capable as native apps. Are you suggesting that random websites should have the same level of access to your device as native apps?
  - dannyr 7y ago
    Web apps! See original comment. Web apps that can ask permission to access features of your phone like a native app. There are Progressive Web Apps now that are decent like Twitter's but it's still not as good as a native app.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Well... it's kind of a catch-22 though. If we all agree that it's good for web apps to be less capable than native apps, then we shouldn't be using the open availability of web apps as an excuse for censoring native apps. There's a lot of stuff this app can't do as a web-app that it can do as a native app. There's a faction of HN that wants to the web to be for read-only documents, and there's a faction of HN that wants the web to be an open, device-agnostic distribution platform for politically risky apps that Apple would otherwise lock off of its devices. But it can't be both. Those two factions often end up talking past each other. It's a very difficult balance.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jeswin 7y ago

I have a lot of privacy concerns with Google. But they have also enabled my phone to run on mostly Open Source code, both OS and applications. This is important to me, and for that reason I bunch them apart from Apple and MS.

paulcarroty 7y ago
> mostly Open Source code, both OS and applications. It's not true. Without closed kernel drivers and closed-source Play Store/Youtube/Pay apps any Android is just piece of plastic.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  The device drivers can be a problem on many devices, even when running AOSP-derived distributions many of these are lifted from a stock distribution and used as blobs. The bit about Android needing Play Store/Youtube/Pay apps is not true though, I do not have any of these on any of my devices which continue to work just fine - I'd go so far as to say that they work better without these parts: battery consumption goes down markedly, privacy invasion goes down tremendously. I might not be getting the 'Android experience' as Google intends but seeing as I do not want that anyway I don't see this as a negative.
  - paulcarroty 7y ago
    > can be a problem on many devices Can you provide a one 100% working Android device with open drivers?
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      Replicant [1, 2] supports 13 (older) devices. As to whether they are 100% working depends on what you intend to use the device for given that some functions (e.g. GPS) are not supported. If you're genuinely interested in this subject a search for blob-free android will give more results, also pointing out alternatives like PostmarketOS and Librem which are not Android-based but (in the case of PostmarketOS) can run on Android hardware [3]. [1] https://www.replicant.us/ https://www.replicant.us/ [2] https://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php https://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php [3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Fnoord 7y ago

Not sure about how newsworthy this is, as it seems rather obvious and is based on different newsworthy sources. By itself, it is not high of content though. Still, discussion about this issue is worth it. Given the author's other post on Twitter > In the 1930s and 40s, Thomas J. Watson’s IBM punch-card mainframes helped Hitler perpetrate the Holocaust. > Imagine what IBM Watson can help dictators achieve today with AI. (Apart from having to think about China's credit score system about which a Black Mirror episode is devoted already.) This made me think of the tangent of the book IBM and the Holocaust [1] which is still on my to read list. AFAIK, in my country (NL) IBM's machines were used to sort based on religion [2]. It is a major historical reason why one's religion is nowadays consider PII. Of course, it is easy to check is someone regularly buys kosher or halal meat at the grocery store... Data is a ticking time bomb. Or, as Bruce Schneier wrote in an essay, "data is a toxic asset." [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_subsidiaries_of_IBM#The_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_subsidia... [3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...

hewrin10 7y ago

Why do people expect Apple to be their friend?

tumetab1 7y ago
There was a recent trend, since mid 00's, that some organizations have the world best interest at heart.

tomashubelbauer 7y ago

Off topic for this particular submission but on topic for Twitter submissions in general: is anyone else rate limited like 90 % of the time when accessing Twitter using the mobile browser on mobile data? Maybe it is because I'm signed out of Twitter in Safari, but I can't read most of the tweets and threads posted to HN.

pfortuny 7y ago
El just get a “unable to load” in the twitter page (or similar message). It goes away if I just reload the page... ?
- tomashubelbauer 7y ago
  Unfortunately for me no amount of reloading fixes it. When it works, it is for no obvious reason except that maybe I got lucky and other users on the same CGNAT my cell service provider is using weren't using Twitter for a while so it's my turn in the Twitters IP white list.
janpot 7y ago
Yes, me, I always have to tap my way out of some nagging dialogs that ask me to log in, or download the app. Then I'm rate limited. I then have to go back and click the link again before I can view it. 100% of the time.
song 7y ago
I've never ever clicked on a twitter link on my mobile phone and seen anything else than the rate limited message. Only way to get around it is to check "Request Desktop Site" but that's an annoying workaround. Never understood how such a major website could be this broken.
Yetanfou 7y ago
Use a different browser, something like Privacy Browser [1] which enables custom Javascript/referer/cookie/etc. settings. For Twitter I tend to block anything and everything which makes it revert to its non-JS page. Enabling Javascript gives the normal page without all those popups and app nags. I have never been rate limited. I am a passive Twitter reader since I do not have an account there so for me this solution works, I do not know whether it is possible to actually post anything on that site in this manner. [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....

ensiferum 7y ago

Business aligns itself with money. It's just that simple.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

drukenemo 7y ago

How could a company ever be the friend of somebody? That's silly from the get-go.

Upvoter33 7y ago

Sadly, in relation to this, governments could be your friend. A good government could stand up for the "right" thing instead of the thing that makes money. But somehow, large subsets of the population have been convinced that government is inherently evil. Companies exist to make money; why would anyone think differently?

thrower123 7y ago
Government is never your friend. It's a bandit that's too big for you to stare down, shaking you down for money every time you turn around.

TwoNineA 7y ago

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

rvz 7y ago
Yes, Aral Balkan has at it for years and appears to be the heir-apparent to Richard Stallman's ethics and principles.

hrbf 7y ago

When did people begin to think that corporations of any kind could be their friends? Did they even? Or is this just another tantrum by yet another man-baby? I don’t want to be rude here, just wondering. Also: given the point is valid, isn’t this largely preaching to the choir? Or is this a predominantly American thing? I’m genuinely interested.

panpanna 7y ago

Comments here summarized in one sentence: Google/Microsoft/Facebook are a bunch of horrible companies, ergo, Apple is good.

DavideNL 7y ago
I would summarise it as: Google/Microsoft/Facebook are a bunch of horrible companies, Apple is least bad.
- panpanna 7y ago
  It starts like that and the further down the threads you go the more it moves toward praising apple for this and that No problem with that, but why does every single post criticizing apple for something end up this way??
- danShumway 7y ago
  Which is still broadly missing the point. What the tweet says: "None of these major companies are your friend. Some are better than others, but none of them, when push comes to shove, care about you." How HN is responding: "But Apple's still technically the best amoral company, right? I mean, if we're gonna rank them. Let's rank them." I agree that people need to be pragmatic about the companies they interact with. Realistically, very few people are going to cut the entirety of FAANG out of their lives, so ranking has some value. But don't let ranking companies get in the way of recognizing that when push comes to shove, even the least bad companies will still throw you under a bus for a buck. That's all the tweet was saying -- recognize that Apple is also an amoral company. Be pragmatic, not loyal. The people on here setting up company tiers are missing that point.

dang 7y ago

This submission has no content. Please do better than that. An OP needs to have interesting information for the reader to process—otherwise we get lame and tedious discussions that we've all heard before. In short: more fiber less sugar. Some sugar is ok, but not only. Indignation counts as sugar.