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Tim definitely carries that torch in his own way, but there was something about Steve's presence that made everything feel more… human? Less corporate? Hard to

Tim definitely carries that torch in his own way, but there was something about Steve's presence that made everything feel more… human? Less corporate? Hard to put into words, but yeah, I miss him too. Thanks for sharing that video.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same, but I do believe that he, himself, is legitimately serious about privacy.
- lordofgibbons 2y ago
  > Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights. They already do that with sending hashes of your photos on your iPhone and implement dark patterns to trick you to upload your data to iCloud. Just 1 CEO change away from having them from being a privacy advocate to a privacy nightmare.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Sure, and every time you eat at a restaurant they could poison you. This is mainly a concern if you are a high value target likely to be the first person poisoned. For most of us, that’s not true, and a formerly good actor turning evil would be noticed long before it came our turn. So there’s the idealist “I can’t be sure my favorite restaurant won’t poison me today, so I’m never eating there again”, and the pragmatic “the benefits I get outweigh the slim chance that today is the day they decide to attack boring people like me” outlook. I’ll never fault someone for being the idealist; the concerns are unfalsifiable. But to me it looks like a rough way to live. Maybe just because I really am that boring so it’s hard to relate to having any super secret stuff that would put me among the first to be attacked.
    - lukifer 2y ago
      The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc. It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.) That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs. And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual. So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.
      - alwayslikethis 2y ago
        > a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal I agree with this part, but relying Apple is quite far from self-sovereignty compared to many other practical alternatives: not relying on external clouds, GrapheneOS, Linux. By relying on Apple, you not only pay a tax to essentially bribe them to not attack you (perhaps a viable strategy, not too different from taxes to governments), but more importantly you give up the ability to resist without serious compromises (can't have E2EE backups on your own cloud if they said so). This is akin to trying to be paying taxes to the government to get better police coverage, and they decide to ban locks, security cameras, and leaving the walled garden. The problem with the current computing security paradigm is that it puts too much trust in entities that do not deserve it, because the entities are simply too powerful and do not suffer consequences when they break that trust.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    Stallman is a brilliant and passionate chap, but he's also a lifelong academic, and has very different life priorities than people that need to make a living at shipping things. He's one end of the spectrum, and NSO is at the other end. The best place is somewhere in the middle.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > NSO is at the other end. I thought I was familiar with the really big players in the privacy/anti-privacy space, but I don't know this one. What is NSO? These guys https://www.nsogroup.com/ https://www.nsogroup.com/ ?
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Yeah. They are about as far away from "freedom" and "privacy" as you can get.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price. You don't write a check for a million dollars to a person who is actively trying to decimate the gay community and still get to wear the rainbow flag.
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? It’s notable that he did that after all the other billionaires did it. Apple can’t go alone on this, they’d be taken apart by a right wing smear campaign (and possibly violence against Apple stores — how many thousands of Apple employees would be affected?). Collective action, even in corporate America, is required to beat these people. The failure here is that like-minded execs didn’t preemptively gather to prevent this outcome in the first place. If you want to be unhappy with Tim Cook, be unhappy that he was too politically naive for too long.
    - reaperducer 2y ago
      Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? He's a leader. He should lead.
      - wrycoder 2y ago
        He did
        kennysoona 2y ago
        By bending a knee?
    - 9dev 2y ago
      This is the exact mindset the Germans put forth when questioned after the war: What should we have done anyway? We were just following orders. We didn’t know what would happen. They would only have taken us, too, if we resisted. If a few more of us would have stood up at the time, the world could look very differently today.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  I do think Tim Cook takes it seriously, though as you said, there's always the question of what happens when leadership changes

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same, but I do believe that he, himself, is legitimately serious about privacy.

lordofgibbons 2y ago
> Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights. They already do that with sending hashes of your photos on your iPhone and implement dark patterns to trick you to upload your data to iCloud. Just 1 CEO change away from having them from being a privacy advocate to a privacy nightmare.
- brookst 2y ago
  Sure, and every time you eat at a restaurant they could poison you. This is mainly a concern if you are a high value target likely to be the first person poisoned. For most of us, that’s not true, and a formerly good actor turning evil would be noticed long before it came our turn. So there’s the idealist “I can’t be sure my favorite restaurant won’t poison me today, so I’m never eating there again”, and the pragmatic “the benefits I get outweigh the slim chance that today is the day they decide to attack boring people like me” outlook. I’ll never fault someone for being the idealist; the concerns are unfalsifiable. But to me it looks like a rough way to live. Maybe just because I really am that boring so it’s hard to relate to having any super secret stuff that would put me among the first to be attacked.
  - lukifer 2y ago
    The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc. It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.) That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs. And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual. So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.
    - alwayslikethis 2y ago
      > a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal I agree with this part, but relying Apple is quite far from self-sovereignty compared to many other practical alternatives: not relying on external clouds, GrapheneOS, Linux. By relying on Apple, you not only pay a tax to essentially bribe them to not attack you (perhaps a viable strategy, not too different from taxes to governments), but more importantly you give up the ability to resist without serious compromises (can't have E2EE backups on your own cloud if they said so). This is akin to trying to be paying taxes to the government to get better police coverage, and they decide to ban locks, security cameras, and leaving the walled garden. The problem with the current computing security paradigm is that it puts too much trust in entities that do not deserve it, because the entities are simply too powerful and do not suffer consequences when they break that trust.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Stallman is a brilliant and passionate chap, but he's also a lifelong academic, and has very different life priorities than people that need to make a living at shipping things. He's one end of the spectrum, and NSO is at the other end. The best place is somewhere in the middle.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > NSO is at the other end. I thought I was familiar with the really big players in the privacy/anti-privacy space, but I don't know this one. What is NSO? These guys https://www.nsogroup.com/ https://www.nsogroup.com/ ?
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      Yeah. They are about as far away from "freedom" and "privacy" as you can get.
reaperducer 2y ago
One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price. You don't write a check for a million dollars to a person who is actively trying to decimate the gay community and still get to wear the rainbow flag.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? It’s notable that he did that after all the other billionaires did it. Apple can’t go alone on this, they’d be taken apart by a right wing smear campaign (and possibly violence against Apple stores — how many thousands of Apple employees would be affected?). Collective action, even in corporate America, is required to beat these people. The failure here is that like-minded execs didn’t preemptively gather to prevent this outcome in the first place. If you want to be unhappy with Tim Cook, be unhappy that he was too politically naive for too long.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    Genuine question: what would you have him do at that point instead? He's a leader. He should lead.
    - wrycoder 2y ago
      He did
      - kennysoona 2y ago
        By bending a knee?
  - 9dev 2y ago
    This is the exact mindset the Germans put forth when questioned after the war: What should we have done anyway? We were just following orders. We didn’t know what would happen. They would only have taken us, too, if we resisted. If a few more of us would have stood up at the time, the world could look very differently today.
eleveriven 2y ago
I do think Tim Cook takes it seriously, though as you said, there's always the question of what happens when leadership changes