7 ms·

Kill Siri (2022)

74 points by lisasays 3y ago

sneak 3y ago
You can also blacklist guzzoni.apple.com in /etc/hosts and/or dns for a belt and suspenders approach.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
microtherion 3y ago
Note that this advice will also disable speech synthesis under some circumstances (e.g. Maps directions).
smohare 3y ago
That site is weirdly unreadable. What’s with the stupid background colors and graphic that obscures text?
- EMCymatics 3y ago
  It is fine to read. I like the panache.
slang800 3y ago
This is impressive, but if you care about privacy then why are you using MacOS to begin with? It seems like you could never be completely certain that it is safe. Rather than starting with a closed system and ripping out the parts that spy on you, why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD?
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I don't think privacy is such a simple scale like this. I actually trust my macbook to be more secure than my Linux desktop. Apple has spent orders of magnitude more securing this device, while my Linux desktop setup is mostly only ensured to be generally working. If anyone with the smallest amount of skill had physical access to my desktop, they could replace the bootloader with a malicious one and get everything when I next log in. While my macbook is secured against basically everyone but top tier federal agents. If I left my macbook in a hotel room, I can reasonably expect it has not been tampered with. There doesn't seem to be any real version of SIP on Linux. Basically every program I run requires full access to everything. Flatpak is sort of tightening things up but it still has a long way to go to close all the loose ends. So while I might have more control over my linux machine, I still trust my macbook more.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Out-of-box, you're generally right. "Hacking" the average Linux user with Secure Boot disabled and a default GRUB configuration with unencrypted ext4 root is like taking candy from a baby. It does beg the question of which system can be more secure, though. Apple has a decently high bar out-of-box, but they could certainly do more to make MacOS a trustless ecosystem. The simple fact that all of MacOS is basically unaccountable from a programming perspective is both a security flaw and a privacy concern. Whereas a public codebase like Linux receives constant intersectional scrutiny, closed systems like MacOS can't have that same attention. Non-transparent codebases cut both ways: they can hide embarassing bugs from people reading the source, but it can also protect zero-days and backdoors that would have otherwise been identified and fixed. Transparent systems only seek a ground truth. So... it's a toss-up. I wouldn't put my life on the line if I was a political dissident considering a Macbook, but Joe Shmoe and his wedding photo editing business should have all the security it needs.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      GNU Linux desktop can’t be made more secure than a Mac in my opinion, without having to rewrite the whole thing to the point where calling it general linux desktop is a stretch. But this is not an OS property - if one would install Android, then the security would improve severalfold, likely better than OSX (mobile OSs are much more modern and security oriented). The reason is that the old-school UNIX permission system is way too crude. The minimum is to run every process under a new user, so that its permissions would even start to make sense. SELinux is also important, as well as secure IPC. Android has all that solved. GrapheneOS on sufficiently secure hardware (! Unfortunately open-source laptops are very bad in this category), which has to be a Pixel for now trades blows with iphones.
      - Gigachad 3y ago
        The Linux security model was designed for a time when you had multiple humans sharing one machine, and every program either came from the OS, or was sourced from a reputable origin. It's almost useless in the current landscape. Some efforts like Flatpak, Wayland, Pipewire, and immutable OSs are starting to improve things, but it still seems like we are years away from having the level of security MacOS had a long time ago. And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD? Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole.
  - derstander 3y ago
    > Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole. I’m in that camp. I ran Slackware on a Compaq laptop in the early 2000’s and it was more work than I would have liked — though I did have more free time then as a student. I swapped to macOS and have been using that since for work and personal productivity projects, though I do use windows to play games. When my MacBook went on the fritz, I was forced to become acquainted with WSL. And I find it to be pretty usable for my use cases. My MacBook is a bit aged at this point and probably needs replacement before too long. But now instead of comparing OSes (Linux or windows with WSL vs macOS), I need to think about hardware: battery life, build quality, and performance; my needs in these categories may still favor Apple in the laptop and small form factors.
  - User23 3y ago
    Has the OpenBSD “desktop experience” progressed past xterm and fvwm2 yet?
    - vogon_laureate 3y ago
      If you mean the default experience, no. Gnome, Xfce, KDE, LXQt, Lumina, DWM, etc are all in ports and packages and fairly straightforward to get set up.
- geraltofrivia 3y ago
  It really sounds like: if you care about Privacy, why do you care about anything else? I want both, privacy and convenience of a Mac OS. I shouldn’t have to compromise.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Note - privacy not guaranteed if Apple is subpoenaed for information: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html In this case, Apple may be compelled to turn over device, account or financial data. So don't do anything bad* and lose your privacy privileges! *Definition of 'bad' subject to local law and interpretation.
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      That's for the data they have, which they generally minimize reasonably well.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      While Apple surely has plenty metadata on users, many of your data is actually e2e encrypted.
      - trympet 3y ago
        I am willing to bet my left nut that they don't encrypt common metadata and telemetry at rest.
        kaba0 3y ago
        Why wouldn’t they? They can analyze it as much as they want even if it’s encrypted (by them), while not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks. So, I would reserve my nuts for better bets.
        smoldesu 3y ago
- MisterTea 3y ago
  And I'd happily run them if the hardware situation wasn't so damn grim. There's no Arm booting standard so you have to re-invent the kernel for each model of chip vs just booting an x86 PC and let the kernel poke at discoverable hardware and figure it out. Arm has old-school ISA like configuration for your non-discoverable hardware with devicetrees preventing generalized kernels from existing. Someone please make open booting and hardware configuration for a general OS on Arm a reality. Without standard booting I feel that open source OS phones will never exist. They're always behind on driver development leaving users with buggy battery murdering devices that are missing features. Dev's don't want to bother with messy alpha quality platforms. They move slow as they don't have FAANG money so the platforms never gain momentum. Simple general booting will change that - no more recompiling a kernel using some byzantine labyrinth build system - just write an image to SD or USB and boot.
  - sunk1st 3y ago
    Please expand on “devicetrees [prevent]… generalized kernels from existing,“ if you don’t mind.
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      I am wrong there, they describe non-discoverable hardware so they are useful. I am confusing them with the issue of getting a kernels built for a lot of the poorly documented hardware that varies a bunch which device trees try to solve but don't. No two vendors agree on how to boot things. I cant just download ubuntu or even openbsd for my phone or tablet as each of those has its own boot loader. Too splintered of a platform.
      - sunk1st 3y ago
        Thanks for your response. It’s an interesting perspective. From my point of view the idea of having incompatible boot protocols is a feature, not a bug. Fundamental differences must exist at some point in the hierarchy. Why not the boot mechanism?
        3y ago
hosteur 3y ago
Great. Now how do I disable voice control on my iPhone (or whatever this anti feature is called: https://ibb.co/wzy6D3w https://ibb.co/wzy6D3w ) I have never, not even once, used this intentionally. It just keeps interrupting me when I activate it by accident.
- n2d4 3y ago
  I don't know what happened there, because it should be disabled by default. But if you accidentally enabled it, you can change that in Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control.
  - hosteur 3y ago
    Not enabled. But it keeps happening if I accidentally press my headset button for a millisecond too long. Had been an issue at least since iPhone 5.
- eviks 3y ago
  You can't, wired headphones and maybe other devices can still activate it even if you disabled it in the settings :(
upon_drumhead 3y ago
While this is great information, I have to wonder why they have the floating thing in the middle of the content that takes you back to the top when clicked. It's really difficult to read while scrolling with it covering most of the content and inverting colors.
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  It's shaped like a virus, too (a bacteriophage), so it looks like an intruder.
  - makingstuffs 3y ago
    It genuinely hurts my eyes the way it contrasts with the backgrounds of containers on the website
- lbarrow 3y ago
  Yea, I just stopped reading when that started up. I don't understand why people intentionally make their websites annoying to read.
- nagonago 3y ago
  To offer a counter opinion: I agree that it makes it difficult to read and serves no real purpose, but I actually kinda like it. It reminds me of the golden ages of the early net, when everybody had their own website, all with questionable but unique design choices. I admit that the current sanitized, standardized net is probably better overall. It's certainly more accessible. But I do appreciate sites that make weird personal choices like this.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Yup, so distracting I stopped reading.
liendolucas 3y ago
Kill Siri? We should kill all voice assistants. I've never witnessed a single person using a voice assistant (mobile or not), but yet these behemoths put money on them, so what's the rationale for having them? One actually valid use case could be for impaired persons but even among them I dare to question their popularity, but I could be wrong.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I use Alexa day-to-day to: - Check the time while doing something else. - Set timers when cooking or before I need to leave - Converting units or doing calculations. - Check the temperature or weather. - Set the temperature of radiators in specific rooms. - Announce upcoming calendar events prior to their occurrence, e.g. which bin day is it tomorrow. - Play/Pause my TV if I'm eating something messy. - Occasionally for playing music. Despite this it still feels very limited. I'd use an assistant that integrated an LLM even more frequently. Alexa's biggest drawback is that she isn't conversational, follow-ups only work when they've been explicitly supported. You can't ask her to clarify or correct her in most cases. Not much work seems to have gone into tightening up the rough edges either. Multi-User support is pretty poor, failing at fairly basic things like "what's on <wife's name>'s calendar tomorrow?". She's unable to answer much about packages as well. Asking her what items are included in the delivery simply prompts her to re-announce that a package is being delivered today.
  - liendolucas 3y ago
    Just curious, don't you have any privacy concerns having something that is potentially listening to you at all times? > Despite this it still feels very limited. Yes, I was actually thinking about this before posting the comment. It can be kind of useful but for very basic things. On mobiles phones is it possible to call emergency services through it?
    - malablaster 3y ago
      What specifically are you concerned about?
firefoxd 3y ago
You can disable it... by not enabling and agreeing to TOS. But now your life will be cat and mouse where you consciously have avoid enabling it as the dialog appears unexpectedly.
mfragin 3y ago
Funny (or sad) story: When my student's first showed me SIRI, I didn't have a smartphone and was basically just going by Stallman ethics (shut up--just saying...). They said, ask Siri to do anything and she can. I picked up my students phone and said, "Siri, how do I inactivate Siri?" They looked nervous and said, "don't ask her THAT!" I went home and watched "Her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)" and thought, .... who knows?
- AdieuToLogic 3y ago
  > They said, ask Siri to do anything and she can. Perhaps a more relevant question to ask your students at that moment might be; why are they anthropomorphizing a program? > I went home and watched "Her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)" and thought, .... who knows? Me thinks you do :-).
jasomill 3y ago
Is there any indication that the processes this post is concerned about actually do anything when Siri is disabled in the usual way? I have no wireless interfaces enabled on my Mac, yet several Wi-Fi services are running. My Mac doesn't support Universal Control, yet UniversalControl.app is running. And so on. One could certainly argue that the fact that unnecessary background processes run unconditionally is sloppy system design, but in the absence of some evidence that they materially affect system operation, I'd just as soon leave them alone. If one's goal is to run a minimalist system, I can hardly think of a worse starting point than macOS, compared to which even Windows is at least somewhat amenable, given that both WinPE and Server Core exist as vendor-supplied examples. I say this as a near full-time Mac user since the early '90s.
jaza 3y ago
Yet another sad (but unsurprising) reflection of Apple's patronising and contemptuous attitude towards its users. This is the number one reason why I don't use Apple products - because Apple consistently says (via its deeds over a long history): "we could make thing xyz opt-out or configurable, but we won't, it's our way or the highway, resistance is futile, f*** you". I'm not a fan of Microsoft either (and they ain't no saints either - anyway, I primarily use Linux), but if I have to choose between Microsoft-land and Apple-land, I choose the former, because they, at least, are and always have been way better at giving their users choice, and at making everything configurable. For me, it's not even so much about privacy, or opaqueness, or interoperability (although Apple is abysmal in those ways too, and they matter too). It's about respect, of which Apple demonstrates none. Even after a concerted effort, the best that the author - someone who appears to have decent technical know-how - could come up with, was a "whack-a-mole" script that kills Siri whenever it rears its ugly head again. Says it all.
- AlexMoffat 3y ago
  How do you square this with your advice to use S3? Apple bad but AWS ok?
  - jaza 3y ago
    That's an incredibly apples-to-oranges comparison! S3 does cloud storage and nothing much else; MacOS runs your whole desktop. Apple's (primary) target audience is Joe-on-the-street consumers; AWS's is devs and businesses. The only comparison relevant in this case, is that they both have AI voice bots, and FWIW, I have no more intention of ever using Alexa than I do of ever using Siri (nor any of the rest of 'em!).
conradev 3y ago
> We have to trust Apple tells the truth, because we have no access to Apple's servers and databases and because its software is closed source. There is no way to confirm this statement. Yes. You do have to trust Apple to tell the truth, just like you trust every vendor to do the same. You can also choose to trust professionals[1] who do compliance/privacy auditing. Only looking at what is directly visible to you (the filesystem) and jumping to conclusions (these things run Siri) is too shallow a pass to understand at all what is going on, and this blog post is just spreading FUD. I helped create one of the daemons you link in the blog post, `siriactionsd`, and it was created for the Shortcuts app. It contains a bucket of different services used across the operating system by a series of features all attributed to Shortcuts. We then then did all of the work to wire everything up to a series of understandable switches: in Shortcuts settings. You can turn those switches off and/or delete the app and you have to (again) trust that the engineering team implemented them properly and in a way that you would agree with. Not all engineering teams are equally good, even at Apple. If you like to understand how your operating system works and what every single process is doing, then I would switch to an open source operating system like Linux. Try turning off other services and looking for traces of them – you'll turn up similar results. Daemons are baked into the read-only operating system image on all of Apple's platforms and there is no way to uninstall them. [1] like Will Strafach: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/accuweather-ios-app-sends-location-data-to-advertising-partner/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/accuweather-i...
- saagarjha 3y ago
  The thing is that Linux isn’t much more accessible at all. Assuming that your vendor isn’t actively trying to hide backdoors from you, reverse engineering closed-source binaries is a little annoying but not all that different from trying to figure out what some open source code does. It’s really the sheer quantity that is the problem here.

Kill Siri (2022)

74 points by lisasays 3y ago

sneak 3y ago

You can also blacklist guzzoni.apple.com in /etc/hosts and/or dns for a belt and suspenders approach.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

microtherion 3y ago

Note that this advice will also disable speech synthesis under some circumstances (e.g. Maps directions).

smohare 3y ago

That site is weirdly unreadable. What’s with the stupid background colors and graphic that obscures text?

EMCymatics 3y ago
It is fine to read. I like the panache.

slang800 3y ago

This is impressive, but if you care about privacy then why are you using MacOS to begin with? It seems like you could never be completely certain that it is safe. Rather than starting with a closed system and ripping out the parts that spy on you, why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD?

Gigachad 3y ago
I don't think privacy is such a simple scale like this. I actually trust my macbook to be more secure than my Linux desktop. Apple has spent orders of magnitude more securing this device, while my Linux desktop setup is mostly only ensured to be generally working. If anyone with the smallest amount of skill had physical access to my desktop, they could replace the bootloader with a malicious one and get everything when I next log in. While my macbook is secured against basically everyone but top tier federal agents. If I left my macbook in a hotel room, I can reasonably expect it has not been tampered with. There doesn't seem to be any real version of SIP on Linux. Basically every program I run requires full access to everything. Flatpak is sort of tightening things up but it still has a long way to go to close all the loose ends. So while I might have more control over my linux machine, I still trust my macbook more.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Out-of-box, you're generally right. "Hacking" the average Linux user with Secure Boot disabled and a default GRUB configuration with unencrypted ext4 root is like taking candy from a baby. It does beg the question of which system can be more secure, though. Apple has a decently high bar out-of-box, but they could certainly do more to make MacOS a trustless ecosystem. The simple fact that all of MacOS is basically unaccountable from a programming perspective is both a security flaw and a privacy concern. Whereas a public codebase like Linux receives constant intersectional scrutiny, closed systems like MacOS can't have that same attention. Non-transparent codebases cut both ways: they can hide embarassing bugs from people reading the source, but it can also protect zero-days and backdoors that would have otherwise been identified and fixed. Transparent systems only seek a ground truth. So... it's a toss-up. I wouldn't put my life on the line if I was a political dissident considering a Macbook, but Joe Shmoe and his wedding photo editing business should have all the security it needs.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    GNU Linux desktop can’t be made more secure than a Mac in my opinion, without having to rewrite the whole thing to the point where calling it general linux desktop is a stretch. But this is not an OS property - if one would install Android, then the security would improve severalfold, likely better than OSX (mobile OSs are much more modern and security oriented). The reason is that the old-school UNIX permission system is way too crude. The minimum is to run every process under a new user, so that its permissions would even start to make sense. SELinux is also important, as well as secure IPC. Android has all that solved. GrapheneOS on sufficiently secure hardware (! Unfortunately open-source laptops are very bad in this category), which has to be a Pixel for now trades blows with iphones.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      The Linux security model was designed for a time when you had multiple humans sharing one machine, and every program either came from the OS, or was sourced from a reputable origin. It's almost useless in the current landscape. Some efforts like Flatpak, Wayland, Pipewire, and immutable OSs are starting to improve things, but it still seems like we are years away from having the level of security MacOS had a long time ago. And I just can't see how any security measure which requires hardware can come to Linux desktop.
lisasays 3y ago
Why not start with an open system like Linux or OpenBSD? Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole.
- derstander 3y ago
  > Probably because they were traumatized by how much extra work that was (and for a sub-par desktop experience overall), last time they went down that rabbit hole. I’m in that camp. I ran Slackware on a Compaq laptop in the early 2000’s and it was more work than I would have liked — though I did have more free time then as a student. I swapped to macOS and have been using that since for work and personal productivity projects, though I do use windows to play games. When my MacBook went on the fritz, I was forced to become acquainted with WSL. And I find it to be pretty usable for my use cases. My MacBook is a bit aged at this point and probably needs replacement before too long. But now instead of comparing OSes (Linux or windows with WSL vs macOS), I need to think about hardware: battery life, build quality, and performance; my needs in these categories may still favor Apple in the laptop and small form factors.
- User23 3y ago
  Has the OpenBSD “desktop experience” progressed past xterm and fvwm2 yet?
  - vogon_laureate 3y ago
    If you mean the default experience, no. Gnome, Xfce, KDE, LXQt, Lumina, DWM, etc are all in ports and packages and fairly straightforward to get set up.
geraltofrivia 3y ago
It really sounds like: if you care about Privacy, why do you care about anything else? I want both, privacy and convenience of a Mac OS. I shouldn’t have to compromise.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Note - privacy not guaranteed if Apple is subpoenaed for information: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html In this case, Apple may be compelled to turn over device, account or financial data. So don't do anything bad* and lose your privacy privileges! *Definition of 'bad' subject to local law and interpretation.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    That's for the data they have, which they generally minimize reasonably well.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    While Apple surely has plenty metadata on users, many of your data is actually e2e encrypted.
    - trympet 3y ago
      I am willing to bet my left nut that they don't encrypt common metadata and telemetry at rest.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Why wouldn’t they? They can analyze it as much as they want even if it’s encrypted (by them), while not doing so would just open them up to to the legal ramifications of data leaks. So, I would reserve my nuts for better bets.
        smoldesu 3y ago
MisterTea 3y ago
And I'd happily run them if the hardware situation wasn't so damn grim. There's no Arm booting standard so you have to re-invent the kernel for each model of chip vs just booting an x86 PC and let the kernel poke at discoverable hardware and figure it out. Arm has old-school ISA like configuration for your non-discoverable hardware with devicetrees preventing generalized kernels from existing. Someone please make open booting and hardware configuration for a general OS on Arm a reality. Without standard booting I feel that open source OS phones will never exist. They're always behind on driver development leaving users with buggy battery murdering devices that are missing features. Dev's don't want to bother with messy alpha quality platforms. They move slow as they don't have FAANG money so the platforms never gain momentum. Simple general booting will change that - no more recompiling a kernel using some byzantine labyrinth build system - just write an image to SD or USB and boot.
- sunk1st 3y ago
  Please expand on “devicetrees [prevent]… generalized kernels from existing,“ if you don’t mind.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    I am wrong there, they describe non-discoverable hardware so they are useful. I am confusing them with the issue of getting a kernels built for a lot of the poorly documented hardware that varies a bunch which device trees try to solve but don't. No two vendors agree on how to boot things. I cant just download ubuntu or even openbsd for my phone or tablet as each of those has its own boot loader. Too splintered of a platform.
    - sunk1st 3y ago
      Thanks for your response. It’s an interesting perspective. From my point of view the idea of having incompatible boot protocols is a feature, not a bug. Fundamental differences must exist at some point in the hierarchy. Why not the boot mechanism?
      - 3y ago

hosteur 3y ago

Great. Now how do I disable voice control on my iPhone (or whatever this anti feature is called: https://ibb.co/wzy6D3w https://ibb.co/wzy6D3w ) I have never, not even once, used this intentionally. It just keeps interrupting me when I activate it by accident.

n2d4 3y ago
I don't know what happened there, because it should be disabled by default. But if you accidentally enabled it, you can change that in Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control.
- hosteur 3y ago
  Not enabled. But it keeps happening if I accidentally press my headset button for a millisecond too long. Had been an issue at least since iPhone 5.
eviks 3y ago
You can't, wired headphones and maybe other devices can still activate it even if you disabled it in the settings :(

upon_drumhead 3y ago

While this is great information, I have to wonder why they have the floating thing in the middle of the content that takes you back to the top when clicked. It's really difficult to read while scrolling with it covering most of the content and inverting colors.

Noumenon72 3y ago
It's shaped like a virus, too (a bacteriophage), so it looks like an intruder.
- makingstuffs 3y ago
  It genuinely hurts my eyes the way it contrasts with the backgrounds of containers on the website
lbarrow 3y ago
Yea, I just stopped reading when that started up. I don't understand why people intentionally make their websites annoying to read.
nagonago 3y ago
To offer a counter opinion: I agree that it makes it difficult to read and serves no real purpose, but I actually kinda like it. It reminds me of the golden ages of the early net, when everybody had their own website, all with questionable but unique design choices. I admit that the current sanitized, standardized net is probably better overall. It's certainly more accessible. But I do appreciate sites that make weird personal choices like this.
TX81Z 3y ago
Yup, so distracting I stopped reading.

liendolucas 3y ago

Kill Siri? We should kill all voice assistants. I've never witnessed a single person using a voice assistant (mobile or not), but yet these behemoths put money on them, so what's the rationale for having them? One actually valid use case could be for impaired persons but even among them I dare to question their popularity, but I could be wrong.

Jochim 3y ago
I use Alexa day-to-day to: - Check the time while doing something else. - Set timers when cooking or before I need to leave - Converting units or doing calculations. - Check the temperature or weather. - Set the temperature of radiators in specific rooms. - Announce upcoming calendar events prior to their occurrence, e.g. which bin day is it tomorrow. - Play/Pause my TV if I'm eating something messy. - Occasionally for playing music. Despite this it still feels very limited. I'd use an assistant that integrated an LLM even more frequently. Alexa's biggest drawback is that she isn't conversational, follow-ups only work when they've been explicitly supported. You can't ask her to clarify or correct her in most cases. Not much work seems to have gone into tightening up the rough edges either. Multi-User support is pretty poor, failing at fairly basic things like "what's on <wife's name>'s calendar tomorrow?". She's unable to answer much about packages as well. Asking her what items are included in the delivery simply prompts her to re-announce that a package is being delivered today.
- liendolucas 3y ago
  Just curious, don't you have any privacy concerns having something that is potentially listening to you at all times? > Despite this it still feels very limited. Yes, I was actually thinking about this before posting the comment. It can be kind of useful but for very basic things. On mobiles phones is it possible to call emergency services through it?
  - malablaster 3y ago
    What specifically are you concerned about?

firefoxd 3y ago

You can disable it... by not enabling and agreeing to TOS. But now your life will be cat and mouse where you consciously have avoid enabling it as the dialog appears unexpectedly.

mfragin 3y ago

Funny (or sad) story: When my student's first showed me SIRI, I didn't have a smartphone and was basically just going by Stallman ethics (shut up--just saying...). They said, ask Siri to do anything and she can. I picked up my students phone and said, "Siri, how do I inactivate Siri?" They looked nervous and said, "don't ask her THAT!" I went home and watched "Her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)" and thought, .... who knows?

AdieuToLogic 3y ago
> They said, ask Siri to do anything and she can. Perhaps a more relevant question to ask your students at that moment might be; why are they anthropomorphizing a program? > I went home and watched "Her https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)" and thought, .... who knows? Me thinks you do :-).

jasomill 3y ago

Is there any indication that the processes this post is concerned about actually do anything when Siri is disabled in the usual way? I have no wireless interfaces enabled on my Mac, yet several Wi-Fi services are running. My Mac doesn't support Universal Control, yet UniversalControl.app is running. And so on. One could certainly argue that the fact that unnecessary background processes run unconditionally is sloppy system design, but in the absence of some evidence that they materially affect system operation, I'd just as soon leave them alone. If one's goal is to run a minimalist system, I can hardly think of a worse starting point than macOS, compared to which even Windows is at least somewhat amenable, given that both WinPE and Server Core exist as vendor-supplied examples. I say this as a near full-time Mac user since the early '90s.

jaza 3y ago

Yet another sad (but unsurprising) reflection of Apple's patronising and contemptuous attitude towards its users. This is the number one reason why I don't use Apple products - because Apple consistently says (via its deeds over a long history): "we could make thing xyz opt-out or configurable, but we won't, it's our way or the highway, resistance is futile, f*** you". I'm not a fan of Microsoft either (and they ain't no saints either - anyway, I primarily use Linux), but if I have to choose between Microsoft-land and Apple-land, I choose the former, because they, at least, are and always have been way better at giving their users choice, and at making everything configurable. For me, it's not even so much about privacy, or opaqueness, or interoperability (although Apple is abysmal in those ways too, and they matter too). It's about respect, of which Apple demonstrates none. Even after a concerted effort, the best that the author - someone who appears to have decent technical know-how - could come up with, was a "whack-a-mole" script that kills Siri whenever it rears its ugly head again. Says it all.

AlexMoffat 3y ago
How do you square this with your advice to use S3? Apple bad but AWS ok?
- jaza 3y ago
  That's an incredibly apples-to-oranges comparison! S3 does cloud storage and nothing much else; MacOS runs your whole desktop. Apple's (primary) target audience is Joe-on-the-street consumers; AWS's is devs and businesses. The only comparison relevant in this case, is that they both have AI voice bots, and FWIW, I have no more intention of ever using Alexa than I do of ever using Siri (nor any of the rest of 'em!).

conradev 3y ago

> We have to trust Apple tells the truth, because we have no access to Apple's servers and databases and because its software is closed source. There is no way to confirm this statement. Yes. You do have to trust Apple to tell the truth, just like you trust every vendor to do the same. You can also choose to trust professionals[1] who do compliance/privacy auditing. Only looking at what is directly visible to you (the filesystem) and jumping to conclusions (these things run Siri) is too shallow a pass to understand at all what is going on, and this blog post is just spreading FUD. I helped create one of the daemons you link in the blog post, `siriactionsd`, and it was created for the Shortcuts app. It contains a bucket of different services used across the operating system by a series of features all attributed to Shortcuts. We then then did all of the work to wire everything up to a series of understandable switches: in Shortcuts settings. You can turn those switches off and/or delete the app and you have to (again) trust that the engineering team implemented them properly and in a way that you would agree with. Not all engineering teams are equally good, even at Apple. If you like to understand how your operating system works and what every single process is doing, then I would switch to an open source operating system like Linux. Try turning off other services and looking for traces of them – you'll turn up similar results. Daemons are baked into the read-only operating system image on all of Apple's platforms and there is no way to uninstall them. [1] like Will Strafach: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/accuweather-ios-app-sends-location-data-to-advertising-partner/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/accuweather-i...

saagarjha 3y ago
The thing is that Linux isn’t much more accessible at all. Assuming that your vendor isn’t actively trying to hide backdoors from you, reverse engineering closed-source binaries is a little annoying but not all that different from trying to figure out what some open source code does. It’s really the sheer quantity that is the problem here.