2 ms·

This is a common trope, and given that they don't speak about these things publicly people will take whatever negative opinion they think up and consider them c

by dijit 2y ago

This is a common trope, and given that they don't speak about these things publicly people will take whatever negative opinion they think up and consider them completely valid. I'm aware of this myself, because I work in games, and sometimes we literally can't comment on things; which leads to the speculation being very often the absolute most negative possible interpretation of what is happening, and completely invalid. To take another more obvious example; imagine OpenBSD was, well, not open. Yet they didn't support Bluetooth. (they don't). From and outside perspective, is this: because they don't consider it open source? Because they're not capable? Because they hate bluetooth headphones or interfacing with audio devices? Is it due to security- maybe related to file sharing or something... it could be privacy. And if we thought they were just pure-through-and-through bastards, we'd think up more. There's another perspective, ironically that covers your point as well as OpenBSD's lack of bluetooth support: What if; it's actually much harder than we realise to make it easy to use and secure? It's totally possible that a standardised format has only hacky, rushed and dangerous implementations. It's not uncommon at all, actually.

hmottestad 2y ago
Well, it’s not like anyone sued a Dutch university for finding security vulnerabilities in their NFC transport card solution…NXP would never rush their implementation to market and then try to sue their way out of any vulnerabilities. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/07/15/transit-card-maker-sues-dutch-university-block-paper/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/07/15/transit-card-maker-...
jclulow 2y ago
They're an absolutely staggeringly immense company and they fight tooth and nail to preserve their rent seeking and premium margins. Nobody owes them a positive interpretation of apparently poor behaviour, especially not when discoverable materials often show the principals are absolutely doing the wrong thing (e.g., Jobs and the anti-labour wage fixing racket). If the company wants people to have positive thoughts, they should do positive things! If indeed there are positive reasons for an apparently negative thing, they should explain them. If they can't or won't explain them, then people absolutely should assume if they feel like they're getting screwed, that they probably are.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  > If the company wants people to have positive thoughts, they should do positive things! This is I think the crux of so many modern philosophical problems. Is it possible for a corporation to do the right things and thrive? Arizona Iced Tea could be an example of this I suppose. Do mega corporations and does Apple actually want people to think positive thoughts about them? We as consumers certainly want them to want that. But I have yet to see evidence of corporations caring about that. Do consumers at all care about how unethical a corporation is (to the first approximation; there are always protest. Remember when Budweiser went out of business? Or Harley?)? If not, this whole thing is moot.
int0x29 2y ago
Years after nfc was added to android I have yet to see anyone complain that I can write an android app that has raw NFC access.
talldayo 2y ago
> and sometimes we literally can't comment on things; which leads to the speculation being very often the absolute most negative possible interpretation This happens everywhere, it's not a problem exclusive to games. It's a problem fundamental to trust - when you stop communicating with your audience, what do they assume from your behavior? Gamedevs feel this pressure as a consequence of releases like Duke Nukem Forever and No Man's Sky that promised the world and came out with nothing. Apple feels this scrutiny for the same reason - the quality of software they make is markedly worse than what they put out 15 or 25 years ago. We have to hold them accountable, Apple's silence is an unacceptable response to the rift they've created with the software standards community. Apple has plenty of unexplained fees and double-standards, as developers we've learned better than to ask why. There is no reason Apple makes me pay $99 per year to improve their platform - they have no justification to arbitrarily deny third-party payment processing. The obvious reason, on the surface, is that offering another business the same full-fat feature access that you have threatens the service you intend to sell. When Apple creates institutions like the App Store, iMessage and Apple Pay, they are implicitly asking themselves how they will treat their competitors. When they design these institutions around features with no third-party parity, they are creating unfair businesses and sustaining them on a policy of secrecy. We are not stupid people, we can surmise why Apple cares about service revenue by looking at their quarterly financials. > What if; it's actually much harder than we realise to make it easy to use and secure? So what? HTTPS is hard to secure, but Apple's not going to stop supporting that over some unnamed ideological protest. NFC and USB are comparatively simple, and you can implement every feature that Apple uses without resorting to DRM or middleware. The only tangible explanation comes in the form of licensing fees for MFi and Apple-branded serial connectors. It's about control and money, two perfectly acceptable explanations for a business as greed-oriented as Apple. You have to be arguing in entirely bad faith to look at the rest of the technology market and assert that it's the standards forum's fault for not responding to issues that Apple won't even confirm they have in the first place. Not only is that one hell of a baseless assumption, it's an apologia based on a source that doesn't exist. Faith is not a virtue, in the business world.
- seec 2y ago
  Thanks for saying all the right things. I'm always dumbfounded when I find all kinds of people on HN who will fight tooth and nail for Apple when clearly their behavior is almost always purely greed motivated. Now, corporations are always greed driven to some extent but the problem is the sole focus on that and the duplicity around the subject from Apple "fans". Modern Apple is so greedy that it makes the Bill Gates era look like child's play. It's not surprising, Bill Gates was an effeminate duplicitous man and Tim Cook is the turbocharged version of that.
lxgr 2y ago
> What if; it's actually much harder than we realise to make it easy to use and secure? No, it's really just Apple being paranoid/greedy about their platform. Android has had HCE for over a decade now. That said, in my view Apple has every right to, on top of HCE, offer access to their secure element at restrictive terms: Even though Java Card has a "firewall" between installed applications, these things aren't really battle-tested to run completely untrusted and potentially hostile applications side by side with e.g. payment card applications. But HCE and SE implementations can coexist! Android has, again, been doing it for over a decade! And Apple even has implemented both HCE and SE – but HCE is EU only (if you're quiet, you can still hear Apple stomping their feet in the distance), whereas SE is "some non-EU countries" only, and requires paying (at least according to TFA) exorbitant fees.
eptcyka 2y ago
Yeah, NFC truly is the hot path to the majority of CVEs on Android, right?
- Terretta 2y ago
  To not get eaten by a bear, you only have to be quicker than the slowest camper.
dmurray 2y ago
> To take another more obvious example; imagine OpenBSD was, well, not open. Yet they didn't support Bluetooth. (they don't). If they didn't outwardly support Bluetooth, but a group of the OpenBSD devs had a side project to support it, and also that side project was deployed on a billion devices around the world and makes those devs millions of dollars every week...then yes, people would definitely accuse them of having motivations that were less than pure.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  I also disagree with their analogy. Like a truer comparison would be if this hypothetical "NonopenBSD" had a fully-functional Bluetooth stack but only with paid partner organizations.

by dijit 2y ago

hmottestad 2y ago

Well, it’s not like anyone sued a Dutch university for finding security vulnerabilities in their NFC transport card solution…NXP would never rush their implementation to market and then try to sue their way out of any vulnerabilities. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/07/15/transit-card-maker-sues-dutch-university-block-paper/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2008/07/15/transit-card-maker-...

jclulow 2y ago

They're an absolutely staggeringly immense company and they fight tooth and nail to preserve their rent seeking and premium margins. Nobody owes them a positive interpretation of apparently poor behaviour, especially not when discoverable materials often show the principals are absolutely doing the wrong thing (e.g., Jobs and the anti-labour wage fixing racket). If the company wants people to have positive thoughts, they should do positive things! If indeed there are positive reasons for an apparently negative thing, they should explain them. If they can't or won't explain them, then people absolutely should assume if they feel like they're getting screwed, that they probably are.

IgorPartola 2y ago
> If the company wants people to have positive thoughts, they should do positive things! This is I think the crux of so many modern philosophical problems. Is it possible for a corporation to do the right things and thrive? Arizona Iced Tea could be an example of this I suppose. Do mega corporations and does Apple actually want people to think positive thoughts about them? We as consumers certainly want them to want that. But I have yet to see evidence of corporations caring about that. Do consumers at all care about how unethical a corporation is (to the first approximation; there are always protest. Remember when Budweiser went out of business? Or Harley?)? If not, this whole thing is moot.

int0x29 2y ago

Years after nfc was added to android I have yet to see anyone complain that I can write an android app that has raw NFC access.

talldayo 2y ago

> and sometimes we literally can't comment on things; which leads to the speculation being very often the absolute most negative possible interpretation This happens everywhere, it's not a problem exclusive to games. It's a problem fundamental to trust - when you stop communicating with your audience, what do they assume from your behavior? Gamedevs feel this pressure as a consequence of releases like Duke Nukem Forever and No Man's Sky that promised the world and came out with nothing. Apple feels this scrutiny for the same reason - the quality of software they make is markedly worse than what they put out 15 or 25 years ago. We have to hold them accountable, Apple's silence is an unacceptable response to the rift they've created with the software standards community. Apple has plenty of unexplained fees and double-standards, as developers we've learned better than to ask why. There is no reason Apple makes me pay $99 per year to improve their platform - they have no justification to arbitrarily deny third-party payment processing. The obvious reason, on the surface, is that offering another business the same full-fat feature access that you have threatens the service you intend to sell. When Apple creates institutions like the App Store, iMessage and Apple Pay, they are implicitly asking themselves how they will treat their competitors. When they design these institutions around features with no third-party parity, they are creating unfair businesses and sustaining them on a policy of secrecy. We are not stupid people, we can surmise why Apple cares about service revenue by looking at their quarterly financials. > What if; it's actually much harder than we realise to make it easy to use and secure? So what? HTTPS is hard to secure, but Apple's not going to stop supporting that over some unnamed ideological protest. NFC and USB are comparatively simple, and you can implement every feature that Apple uses without resorting to DRM or middleware. The only tangible explanation comes in the form of licensing fees for MFi and Apple-branded serial connectors. It's about control and money, two perfectly acceptable explanations for a business as greed-oriented as Apple. You have to be arguing in entirely bad faith to look at the rest of the technology market and assert that it's the standards forum's fault for not responding to issues that Apple won't even confirm they have in the first place. Not only is that one hell of a baseless assumption, it's an apologia based on a source that doesn't exist. Faith is not a virtue, in the business world.

seec 2y ago
Thanks for saying all the right things. I'm always dumbfounded when I find all kinds of people on HN who will fight tooth and nail for Apple when clearly their behavior is almost always purely greed motivated. Now, corporations are always greed driven to some extent but the problem is the sole focus on that and the duplicity around the subject from Apple "fans". Modern Apple is so greedy that it makes the Bill Gates era look like child's play. It's not surprising, Bill Gates was an effeminate duplicitous man and Tim Cook is the turbocharged version of that.

lxgr 2y ago

> What if; it's actually much harder than we realise to make it easy to use and secure? No, it's really just Apple being paranoid/greedy about their platform. Android has had HCE for over a decade now. That said, in my view Apple has every right to, on top of HCE, offer access to their secure element at restrictive terms: Even though Java Card has a "firewall" between installed applications, these things aren't really battle-tested to run completely untrusted and potentially hostile applications side by side with e.g. payment card applications. But HCE and SE implementations can coexist! Android has, again, been doing it for over a decade! And Apple even has implemented both HCE and SE – but HCE is EU only (if you're quiet, you can still hear Apple stomping their feet in the distance), whereas SE is "some non-EU countries" only, and requires paying (at least according to TFA) exorbitant fees.

eptcyka 2y ago

Yeah, NFC truly is the hot path to the majority of CVEs on Android, right?

Terretta 2y ago
To not get eaten by a bear, you only have to be quicker than the slowest camper.

dmurray 2y ago

> To take another more obvious example; imagine OpenBSD was, well, not open. Yet they didn't support Bluetooth. (they don't). If they didn't outwardly support Bluetooth, but a group of the OpenBSD devs had a side project to support it, and also that side project was deployed on a billion devices around the world and makes those devs millions of dollars every week...then yes, people would definitely accuse them of having motivations that were less than pure.

plagiarist 2y ago
I also disagree with their analogy. Like a truer comparison would be if this hypothetical "NonopenBSD" had a fully-functional Bluetooth stack but only with paid partner organizations.