AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

https://twitter.com/tibor/status/1597296268275240960

by doener • 4 years ago

959 620 4 years ago

Apple: where it's totally fine to build products with what amounts to slave labor, and aiding the CCP in censorship is totally cool too, but Twitter is far too dangerous to be allowed on the app store because a meanie is in charge of it.

mhoad6• 4 years ago

Once again we have a situation where the only person making that final claim is a known serial liar and shit poster.

Just like how last week he made that ridiculous claim about the promises he thought brand safety groups had made to him and then everybody else who was in the meeting said he was making shit up. Again.

friedman232• 4 years ago

Once again we have a situation where the only person making that final claim is a known serial liar and shit poster.

No, it's not just Elon. It is common knowledge that Apple uses this abusive behavior to censor and restrict app makers.

elicash7• 4 years ago

Speaking of twitter, it's weird Musk hasn't commented yet on the protests in China. Looking forward to him taking on censorship and standing for free speech around the globe, particularly in China.

Rebelgecko3• 4 years ago

Twitter is already blocked in China

PakG1• 4 years ago

You're probably being sarcastic? I would say that's not likely to happen with how he's already bowed to China multiple times in order to get benefits for Tesla.

edit: I see you commented regarding Tesla below. I'm not confident that his respect for free speech is universal. He seems to care more about the free speech that he prefers at times, mostly related to what impacts him on a personal level. That being said, that's unfortunately normal for most people too.

kennywinker2• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/TinaDesireeBerg/status/15955262149359042...

To summarize:

Elon Musk: "No far left accounts have been banned from twitter"

Commenter: "False, here are four examples"

Elon Musk: Suspends commenters account.

Champion of free speech indeed.

Here is same info summarized in newsweek, since we've all learned how trustworthy twitter screenshots are in recent weeks https://www.newsweek.com/activists-accuse-elon-musk-banning-...

nxm• 4 years ago

Looking forward to LeBron James and the NBA doing the same

sschueller• 4 years ago

You're joking right? He is so far up china's behind that he was offered Chinese citizenship which is almost impossible to get.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/tesla-boss-elon-musk-offered...

fredgrott• 4 years ago

he did in fact, also be aware that we might be able to get his deleted tweets via archive.org

walrus014• 4 years ago

You don't buy a majority stake in a $44bn company where the 2nd largest pre-existing, long standing early investor and shareholder is the Saudi royal family unless you're very comfortable with authoritarian regimes.

edit: the saudis still own their shares, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prin...

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure why you want to hear Musk's opinions on the protests in China, I assume it's either because you're a big fan or because you think its essential that every rich person opine about every issue so that the poors know how they should think about it.

What I wonder is why so many libs are so happy about anti-covid lockdown protests? Backwards day, or just nationalists?

NaturalPhallacy• 4 years ago

Speaking of twitter, it's weird Musk hasn't commented yet on the protests in China.

Tales about what people haven't done are pure propaganda. I first noticed this under trump. News outlets constantly decried him for things he didn't do. That isn't news. News is fundamentally what did happen. Everything else is propaganda. It's a particularly insidious way to malign someone that seems rational, but with absolutely no substance behind it.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

What is this a reference to? Twitter is currently not only available in the Apple App Store, but is an Editor's Choice award winner.

Mistletoe2• 4 years ago

Apple has threatened to remove it from the App Store and I would love to see that happen just for the chaos of it all.

Mistletoe2• 4 years ago

Why not both? This is a false equivalence, they can be and are all bad.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

This is a false equivalence
they can be and are all bad.

This sentence is arguing against itself, because you felt like you had to stick two twitter cliches in. Por que no los dos? Porque cuando dos cosas no son identicas, no son identicas tampoco.

api2• 4 years ago

Musk is also in China's pocket via Tesla. Anything to the contrary is posturing. Look into how much China factors into Tesla's bottom line.

The fact is that we are all in China's pocket to some extent. We are addicted to cheap Chinese labor.

throwaway235972• 4 years ago

It's true, and it won't stop me from buying iPhones. I just wish Apple could recognize this and drop the ridiculous self-righteous moral facade. Same with pretty much all companies.

anigbrowl3• 4 years ago

Twitter is far too dangerous to be allowed on the app store

Has this actually happened, or is just another attention-seeking rumor being misrepresented as fact?

nostromo• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597300125243944961

jjtheblunt• 4 years ago

what the product you typed that with built by a different contract manufacturer than whatever Apple uses?

(I don't know the set of all such)

photoGrant• 4 years ago

I want to believe this is just badly timed. I don't know, I very often want to AirDrop with someone I don't know or have a contact for -- clients of clients, usually... And I've found I set it to 'Everyone' and forget. Which isn't ideal on the odd plane-trip with people trying to be funny...

pcl• 4 years ago

There’s a big difference between adding a 10-min option and removing the permanent option though.

Plus, it’s notable that apple didn’t use the same 1 hour / end of day / forever system that they use for location sharing.

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

Sooner or later Apple will have to losen its grip on the device because if they not, counties will simply try to use Apple as enforcer. Just as with privacy the best road being "We don't have that data", the best road with this is to be able to say "We don't have control over it".

onetimeusename• 4 years ago

it already has in China. I don't know how much is known to the public but in order to do business in China, Apple has created a parallel Chinese app store/icloud/etc.[1][2] I imagine even the operating systems and possibly hardware differ from what they sell elsewhere.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

I'm aware. My guess is, it mostly flies under the radar because this is not happening in Europe or the USA but for how long? What happens when Italy&Hungary starts demanding modifications to protect their citizens against godlessness, abortion, sex out of wedlock, political organisations against them or whatever agenda the far right has?

You might say its the same about the "woke culture censorship" but it is not, in the case of the trends that are in mission to design society those people don't shame people out of society or they don't boycott - they physically target people. Many people lost their lives since 2016(The year of Brexit&Trump).

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

I don't know if a third-party app might be able to duplicate this functionality, but even if so the problem is third party apps can be banned, and can be seen on phones by authorities and used as a reason for suspicion. People have to be bold enough to install it to receive messages too.

jsnell4• 4 years ago

This seems to have been announced a couple of weeks ago, so we don't need to just trust the tweet: https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird...

Having it open to everyone for only a limited amount of time actually kind of seems like the right thing, but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

brandur• 4 years ago

To be fair: (1) it seems like the update landed recently, and (2) the article you linked does cite the same reasoning as the Twitter posts. Even if was a little ahead of the more recent Zero Covid protests, it seems like AirDrop's been a known vector in China to share government criticism, which is why Apple's cracking down.

jsnell4• 4 years ago

Sure, I didn't mean this in the "this is old news" sense, but in the "this has been verified by Apple themselves, not just a random Twitter account".

snoot10• 4 years ago

which is why Apple's cracking down.

This is absurd. Apple is doing this because of government pressure, not because of their own desire to crack down.

Maximus9000• 4 years ago

That's interesting that this was rolled out a few weeks ago, however the article also says:

Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.

andreysolsty• 4 years ago

Looking at it from a users perspective, people constantly trying to airdrop me stuff is not something I want, even though I want to use “everyone” at times. I’ve had this happen in public before and it’s annoying but maybe it’s become so widespread that it’s a UX issue in China?

ThePhysicist• 4 years ago

The timing of the change seems quite conspicuous [1], and it's also weird that Apple would introduce this in China first and only roll it out to the rest of the world next year. The same article mentions that Apple blocks the Taiwanese flag emoji in China, for which it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship.

1: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...

whimsicalism2• 4 years ago

Apple certainly tailors the emojis available to the local political climate.

They don't, for instance, have the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, instead using the flag of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

anon4002323• 4 years ago

Bowing to censorship? Bowing isn't necessarily done happily.

Or maybe more ideas are also in play? Perhaps recognizing the existing power dynamics? Perhaps playing the game over a longer time frame?

Not all ethicists recommend "dying on your sword" so to speak. Sometimes it is useful to maintain influence and fight another day. These things are far from simple.

If you want Apple to push back on censorship in China, let's talk about the details. What would China likely do in return?

stcredzero• 4 years ago

it's hard to come up with an explanation other than bowing to censorship

If one believes Elon Musk's view of the Twitter situation with the app store, Apple seems to be for more censorship!

standardUser• 4 years ago

You know what actually makes sense? Creating a setting that the user can change as they see fit.

cosmojg2• 4 years ago

Customization? On an Apple device? Are you out of your mind?

mistermann• 4 years ago

Perhaps that didn't receive approval from a higher power.

noobface• 4 years ago

But options are so complicated and boring. Can I just pay you to pick the best one for me?

moralestapia• 4 years ago

That would be nice, right?

Unfortunately, <queue some made up story from Apple's PR team about how some soldier's lives were saved by limiting AirDrop time to exactly 10 minutes>.

wonnage4• 4 years ago

I legitimately don't understand how this has been spun into some sort of pro-censorship move. Leaving your phone open to getting AirDrop-ed by anyone in the vicinity just seems like a terrible idea in general, but especially in China. Apple is helping the authoritarian dictatorship by checks notes not having your phone advertise to everyone nearby that it can receive files from anyone?

The ability for dissidents to airdrop messages to passers-by seems silly as well. All of a sudden spamming people is good due to the content of the message? Never mind that there's nothing stopping the other side from doing the same thing.

It ultimately feels to me like the country that's always in the news for hackers and ubiquitous surveillance should be the last place in the world you want to have AirDrop on, period. Even the contacts-only mode has leaked personal information in the past.

expensive_news• 4 years ago

I agree with all of your points. To me this seems like correcting an oversight in Apple’s original implementation vs Apple taking away a ‘feature’.

I’ve gotten AirDrop spam here in America and welcome this change.

eozoon• 4 years ago

Because people sending dick pics and spam had been a known issue for ages, yet this change came soon after China complaining about people sending protest flyers, rolled out in China first, and with no option to leave your phone open. One can argue whether it's Apple's job to fight censorship (and I might agree that it's not), but you have to willfully blind say this is not pro-censorship.

rosywoozlechan• 4 years ago

so the title of this post is incorrect, this setting was not enabled due to the protests

GekkePrutser2• 4 years ago

Of course the zero-covid protests were also around a couple weeks ago..

noncoml• 4 years ago

But it wasn’t until today that Musk decide to start a propaganda war against Apple.

freefruit• 4 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23450967/apple-airdrop-l...

It was brought in because of protests in mainland China. Just not because of the current ones, but previous ones.

ilyt• 4 years ago

A setting with 10 minutes default would be reasonable change for users sake, in case they forget to turn it off.

Force 10 minutes with no optoon to turn it back? Yeah...

but it's hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

The China told them to and they complied. They have every interest in China's government keeping their people in check so the Apple factory production continues without problems.

Follow the money and all that

riobard• 4 years ago

hard to come up with a legit explanation for why they rushed that change to China first.

Not hard at all.

On Oct 13, 2022 this protest happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Sitong_Bridge_protest), which the CCP considered a serious offense, potentially on the same level of the 1989 protest.

At the time people, especially college students around that area (lots of universities nearby), were using AirDrop to share photos of the protest, because social medium was heavily censored. University administrators were tasked to make sure iPhone-carrying students to disable allowing AirDrop from everyone to stop the spread of the images.

A few weeks later, iOS public betas were found to come with the change to limiting AirDrop to 10 minutes, and nothing about it was ever mentioned in release note.

Was Apple pressured by the CCP to rush this? I don't know. Look at the evidence and judge by yourself.

But there's a more nuanced perspective.

It is rumored that CCP has the ability to actually track and uncover the identity of iOS devices sending AirDrop. Think about it: how else AirDrop can limit to receive from contacts only? If so, AirDrop would provide a false sense of anonymity and deniability, and Apple would put some of its customers in jeopardy if they do nothing.

By limiting AirDrop from everyone to 10 minutes, Apple achieved three objectives:

1. They showed compliance (they have to, if they want to keep the business in China); 2. They avoided the potential reputation damage in the scenario where protesters are caught AirDropping offensive materials (e.g. “iPhones aren't as secure as Apple advertises after all”); 3. They closed a loophole in which people get spammed (yes, allowing AirDrop from everyone gets you mostly spams anyway).

The “mistake” Apple made was that it did not a) rush the change to all regions, and b) mention it explicitly in release note, therefore completely exposed them to the first objective and failed to convey the nuances.

krick2• 4 years ago

Why does it seem "the right thing"? I mean, it's pretty stupid to actually keep it open for everyone forever, but if I want that (and I don't know why it was even an option, but I assume somebody wants that) — that's my business, it doesn't hurt anyone. Also, limiting it to 10 minutes doesn't help, since I just can keep turning it on and on it seems.

Adding one more option could make some sense, but it's weird anyways. Why arbitrary 10 minutes? How turning it for 10 minutes in a crowded place is better than turning it on for an hour? It's silly.

WiSaGaN• 4 years ago

The AirDrop spam has been a headache in China for sometime: https://www.pingwest.com/a/256995

yangvz• 4 years ago

It's because recently there's report on the internet that some people are receiving nude photos from random guys over AirDrop (*on subways), and the fact that sexual harassment charges in China are pressed rather weakly.

mhoad6• 4 years ago

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.

I’ve lost count of how many scandals have come out of their relationship with China from the suicide nets to the repeated investigations showing their supply chain was riddled with slave labor that they would later campaign against protections that would prevent it. Now this. They are fucked as a company, I can’t get out of their ecosystem fast enough.

walrus014• 4 years ago

I mean, to be real here, it's continuing the principles of being run for a very long time by a world class, top tier, grade A asshole. Steve Jobs was well known for screaming at people and throwing fits of rage and such. Petulantly demanding that he get his way as the only possible method something could be done.

Does anyone seriously think that Jobs cared even the slightest about the Foxconn/Hon Hai Precision Industry factory workers? Or anything else other than the bottom line?

Hundreds of such anecodotes from hundreds of people. What do you expect from the corporate culture established by such a person?

karaterobot3• 4 years ago

No fan of Jobs here, but there's no logical connection between him being an asshole and Apple's decision to change AirDrop behavior more than a decade after his death.

Tijdreiziger• 4 years ago

The problem is that the alternative (Google) is worse.

alphabetting2• 4 years ago

Pretty sure Google has been mostly out of China since Operation Aurora.

mhoad6• 4 years ago

It’s not even a little bit close. Go on… tell me about how Google spent millions lobbying against human rights or worked with authoritarian regimes or had workers killing themselves in such high numbers that they had to reconfigure their workplaces.

Google did what Apple should have ten years ago and pulled out of China when faced with similar problems.

foepys2• 4 years ago

Is it? With the Android Open Source Project you can create your own completely Google-free Android distribution that you can install on quite a lot of devices.

Not that I like Google, I actually actively dislike it and hate all the anti-competitive things they did (with Android, too), but let's stay with the facts here.

PartiallyTyped• 4 years ago

Is this true even if say you use GrapheneOS?

ricardobayes• 4 years ago

I'm genuinely curious, how so?

lern_too_spel4• 4 years ago

Aside from avoiding China, Google gives users control of their phones. That makes Google leagues better. Not that Google is good — Apple just sets a particularly low bar.

yamtaddle11• 4 years ago

In general the problem is that there are very few players in even the same general space as Apple, and practically none of them seem to really be chasing the same market as Apple, so for many Apple users there's basically no suitable substitute. It lets them have entire dud releases (several models in a row of macbooks, for instance) but if you start looking around for alternatives it quickly becomes clear you'll gain two or three problems for every one you avoid, even when Apple releases an unusually-bad version of one of their products.

It's like that with everything. "Apple spies on you more than you might think"—OK, that's bad and I'd rather they didn't, but who's better? Hell, who's not worse? And god no, not Linux, I did that for over a decade and I mean a product that you can pay for to solve problems for you, like computers and tools generally are supposed to do, not one you can spend a bunch of time manually tuning and working around various limitations and problems and still not have something as useful as Apple's stuff in actual day-to-day real-world life. I want to solve problems, I don't want another hobby of maintaining my problem-solving machine, that crap's why people hate computers so much.

No surprise it's like this, really—there are two smartphone operating systems and three viable desktop operating systems (I'm being generous and counting ChromeOS) controlled by three total vendors. Of course the market's totally fucked up.

curiousgal• 4 years ago

I can’t get out of their ecosystem fast enough.

I don't know if you mean this literally but to me it was very simple. Just stopped buying their products. I am still alive, productive and with a clearer consciousness.

api2• 4 years ago

Is there anyone who isn't dependent on Chinese labor or the Chinese market? How are the Android vendors in this respect?

From what I can see the entire world is completely addicted to China as a cheap source of medium to high skill labor and as a place where manufacturing can be done with little environmental regulation.

boringg• 4 years ago

I mean you don't really believe that OP is actually on the apple ecosystem do you? And that this one thing is the straw that broke the camels back?

tananaev• 4 years ago

On one hand, yes, it's not ideal. On the other hand it's still probably a better alternative to a Chinese phone that spies on you. What is the alternative? If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.

You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now we have a complete dictatorship.

HardlyCurious2• 4 years ago

Getting banned from China shouldn't be looked at as something a business can't consider. If so, it gives tremendous leverage to China to control western corporations.

What we need is govt sanctions against china before this goes any further. Take china off the table so companies don't have to make these hard choices that impact their competitiveness.

illuminati1911• 4 years ago

”If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.”

Unlikely as that kind of a move would have a huge global impact. That might lead to all Chinese companies (Bytedance, Xiaomi etc.) being banned in the west/US etc.

There would be consequences though.

echelon• 4 years ago

Apple loves to keep up appearances, but they are behind some of the worst behaviors in our industry.

Apple has already soured competition in computing by making the App Store the only way to reach 51+% of Americans with your software. They heavily tax it, artificially limit your ability to update and deploy, force you to devote resources to regularly adhere to Apple standards, let people place ads under your name, kill your customer relationships, force deep Apple product integrations, etc.

"CSAM device scanning" is a Trojan horse that will absolutely be abused in situations like we're seeing in China now.

Apple sells itself on privacy, yet collects more info on you than Facebook to feed their growing ads business. It's hypocrisy.

Other major tech companies looked at China and said no. Why can't Apple?

themacguffinman• 4 years ago

If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.

Google did, and they were. Is it too much to ask that Apple be as courageous and idealistic as Google on privacy?

gonehome• 4 years ago

I think that can true to a point and is probably true of governments. The United States Government may need to hold its nose and work with Saudi Arabia in some cases despite their problems because of other geopolitical tradeoffs, but I'd argue that is not necessary for companies. In the case of companies, it's mostly about rationalizing something they want to do anyway (in this case operate in the Chinese market).

In the case of western companies operating in China it's even worse because this becomes a soft power the CCP can influence on the west creating a form of self-censorship or even capture (see Ray Dalio).

A lot of companies have told themselves that their presence will be a positive influence on problematic policy of a country they want to enter, but what ends up happening is that the policy is a corrupting influence on the principles of the company.

https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html

colordrops3• 4 years ago

They should have pulled their manufacturing out of China years ago, and forgone the market. It's pretty clear that the compromises Apple makes are worse overall than any supposed benefit of taking market share from Chinese phone manufacturers.

jackmott42• 4 years ago

Their ethics are terrible. You pay $1000 for a computer, and you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to. You can only pay for software on their own store. Complete bullshit, and it makes me sad that so many here on HN and elsehwere, tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so many of you will defend this terrible situation.

yamtaddle11• 4 years ago

You pay $1000 for a computer, and you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to.

For i-devices, yeah, true.

You can only pay for software on their own store.

As nice as exposing the App store to more market effects might be, the app store monopoly enables them to force other companies to be less shitty on the platform (or else abandon it—but it's lucrative, so most don't), so it's a feature to me. I'd rather some of the behaviors they ban were simply illegal everywhere, but until then I like having the option to live the libertarian dream of paying for a private regulatory agency (Apple, that is). Beats having no option of that sort.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

The PC is sadly moving in the same direction.

snoot10• 4 years ago

tech people who learned to program because their 8088 was completely open and free to let you actually create things and learn about computing, so many of you will defend this terrible situation.

There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

I have a Mac, and I also have Linux machines. Nothing is stopping people learning about computers.

Why would anyone spend $1000 on a computer from Apple if it’s not what they want?

tristor• 4 years ago

This exact situation is why this year was the first Thanksgiving that I didn’t spend 3/4 of my visit to my parents doing tech support and cleaning up malware. I bought them Apple hardware last Christmas and I’d do it again.

In 2022 the Internet is a hostile landscape where trillions of dollars are made on the back of malicious adtech by some of the largest companies in the world and there is no pathway for the average user to truly control their own system. At least Apple’s walled garden is better than Microsoft’s brothel and Google’s crackhouse.

throwthere• 4 years ago

How does that look like bad ethics? You know you’re buying a walled garden with an Apple. If you care, then don’t buy Apple. That doesn't make Apple's ethics bad. It just goes against your prefences.

buffington• 4 years ago

you are only allowed to install software on it that Apple says you are allowed to

This isn't accurate. macOS' default security settings (System > Security & Privacy) have "Allow apps downloaded from:" set to "App Store" by default. Selecting "App Store and identified developers" allows you to install anything from the App store, or anything that's been code signed.

If you want to execute unsigned code, you can disable SIP (System Integrity Protection) and relive all your 8088 glory days.

You can only pay for software on their own store.

Also entirely inaccurate. Almost all of the macOS software I've purchased was done so outside of the App store, paying developers directly.

compiskey3• 4 years ago

That’s an overly reductive to prove a biased point. Typical users do not have the same motivations as programmers. The market for connected devices does not have to conform to your expectations.

It’s really exhausting pointing out how your argument would effectively force others to produce what satisfies your sensibilities and to protect what you feel is sacrosanct.

Programming is “just math”. I don’t need an 8088 to prove its adding, subtracting, comparing memory addresses. All the cognitive structure and literalness of the past has nothing to do with software and everything to do with hardware engineering.

That the industry has not clung to your nostalgic ideal does not mean there is a tyrannical conspiracy. It means the industry evolved.

Perhaps you’re just on the wrong career path?

shepherdjerred3• 4 years ago

You can only pay for software on their own store.

I would love to see Apple adopt a more open ecosystem, and I could see it happening in the net 5-10 years.

But, nobody cares about this aside from the tech community. The average smartphone user is fine with the status quo.

S2012• 4 years ago

Completely agree with you here. Even in my circle of engineer friends I'm generally viewed as the open source zealot for only buying Pixel phones purely because I can unlock the bootloader on them and root them still. I only have one app that actually uses it (for making backups of installed apps) but it's the principle of the thing: if I bought and paid for a device I should be allowed to run whatever darn code I want on it, not only code that the manufacturer says I'm allowed to run. It's my device, not theirs.

Apparently that's a radical position to have these days and I find it irresponsible that software folks of all people won't stand up more for the right to run their code on their own devices without the approval of the manufacturer. As you said, the existence of our industry is due in large part to the openness of previous systems. We owe it to ourselves and those that will come after to ensure this level of openness persists.

zanethomas2• 4 years ago

I recently abandoned Apple, went with a frame.work laptop running Ubuntu.

substation13• 4 years ago

Asahi Linux will be the best of both worlds. I can't wait!

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

75% of my non-techie relatives who have retired from office jobs in the past 15 years - from workplaces where using MS Windows, Office, etc., etc. was required every working hour - have downsized to having only a iPad and iPhone. And they're completely happy that they did so.

They mostly just want a web browser and e-mail. They buy ~zero non-free apps. And they want the "freedom" you're selling about as much as they want the "authenticity" of living off the land in rural Alaska.

lairv• 4 years ago

I have always been surprised by the popularity of Apple products in the programming community, I feel like Apple's philosophy is something no one [from the tech world] should want the programming community to move towards.

jibbers• 4 years ago

suicide nets

I assume this is about Foxconn. Does that mean you'll be boycotting other companies that also work with them, like Amazon, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Vizio, Acer, Lenovo, Nintendo, and Sony?

I'm genuinely asking. It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

s0rce• 4 years ago

The raw materials have a pretty bad track record as well.

walrus014• 4 years ago

It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

Watching some in depth documentaries on the global low-cost-fashion trade in textiles and garments is also a real eye opener.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rana_Plaza_factory_collap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Dhaka_garment_factory_fir...

nicolas_t• 4 years ago

I remember reading some reports that actually looked at suicide rate based on the number of people working there and didn't find it that elevated compared to the average. Fact is, anytime you have a big concentration of people in a small place you will have some suicides just by virtue of statistics, so I'm not sure if there's really a much higher number of suicides or if the few that did happen were sensationalised because it sells.

That's not to say that working in a company like Foxconn is the nicest possible job (it's not but it seems to be better than a lot of places) or that China is great and can do no wrong (I'm generally very critical of the CCP) but I do think that sometimes it's easy to just spin up a story to shock people because that sells.

danuker• 4 years ago

I have been using second hand phones for a while. My current phone is running Android 5.

I don't treat them as secure, however. I have not entered credit cards nor my Google account.

Aunche• 4 years ago

The hysteria about Foxconn suicides was complete clickbait garbage. Even during their worst year of suicides that was reported by Wired, the suicide rate at FoxConn was 1/10th of that of the US and 1/20th of that of China overall.

It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

This is actually overwhelmingly a good thing. Life expectancy and living standards have exploded in Asia. They just haven't reached the point of developed Western nations yet. It's impossible to transition from very shitty conditions to good conditions hitting a midpoint of moderately shitty conditions. For example, the abundance of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs incentives teenagers to drop out of school and work instead. Of course, we are right to call out Apple for relying on child labor, but the goal should be to have a better control of their supply chain rather than move manufacturing back to the US.

Frost1x2• 4 years ago

It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

It's far far more than 'tech' stuff. A lot of everything we enjoy is built off the backs of the poor and exploited, that's how most of the system we have works at a fundamental level.

hellfish3• 4 years ago

I assume this is about Foxconn. Does that mean you'll be boycotting other companies that also work with them, like Amazon, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Vizio, Acer, Lenovo, Nintendo, and Sony?

It would be easier to just ban them with legislation, similar to what's been done with Huawei

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

They look like they are good at privacy simply because they are so possessive and controlling of their users. Of course they stop other companies from getting your data, your data belongs to Apple, not to the other companies.

petmon2• 4 years ago

Apple in many cases goes out of their way to avoid collecting your data. See Maps for example. Users' usage of Maps is associated with a random rotating identifier not tied to their accounts. This is quite different from Google Maps.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/

acdha4• 4 years ago

I think it's fair to point out these inconsistencies but what do we expect them to do? China is a sovereign country _and_ it's the one where they make most of their hardware. It is unclear to me what options they have other than expanding manufacturing in other countries, which seems to be in progress.

rhacker• 4 years ago

its like 5 post down in twitter, it was a planned update from a while ago

ralfd2• 4 years ago

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.

Counterpoint:

They could have just rolled out the feature change globally. Instead Apple makes it clear with singling out China, that this change was demanded by the CCP.

colordrops3• 4 years ago

They've had years to pull manufacturing out of China to avoid having to make these compromises, but they chose not to. They could forgo the Chinese market, as many other companies have, in order to avoid needing to make unsavory choices, but they chose not to. And don't blame the shareholders for pushing Apple to stay in China. By that logic, no company is guilty of anything.

Frost1x2• 4 years ago

Yet they still and will continue to operate largely in China. "Hey consumers, China bad, but China cheap."

onlyrealcuzzo4• 4 years ago

The problem is expecting companies to "do the right thing" and not "make money".

If there was ever a time companies were good stewards to the world - that time ended before I was born.

Yes, Apple is not doing the right thing.

Show me any fortune 100 company in the world that would do the right thing...

What's frustrating - I think - in this case, is the amount of Apple fanboys who insist that Apple is literally the incarnation of God as a company, existing solely to bring about harmony and make the world better through the iPhone, not to take your money and put it in their shareholders' pockets.

randomdata3• 4 years ago

Show me any fortune 100 company in the world that would do the right thing...

Companies don't do anything. People do. The individuals who make up any Fortune 100 company most likely do want to do the right thing individually, but communication at scale is really hard which leads to all kinds of unintended consequences.

snoot10• 4 years ago

1. The suicide nets is misinformation.

2. The supply chain is not riddled with slave labor.

3. The chance to airdrop was made weeks before the protest.

You might not be basing your evaluation of Apple’s behavior on reality.

mhoad6• 4 years ago

7 Apple suppliers in China have links to forced labor programs, including the use of Uyghur Muslims from Xinjiang, according to a new report

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/apple-c...

Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

Chairs Issue Statement about Forced Labor in Apple’s Supply Chain

https://www.cecc.gov/media-center/press-releases/chairs-issu...

I’m not the one here who isn’t basing their evaluation on reality.

baxtr5• 4 years ago

This is a comment filled with sheer hate. No facts, no nuances. Just emotions.

MisterTea• 4 years ago

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.

They champion them here in the USA where saying so is good for business.

They champion censorship in China because it's good for business.

They'll champion whatever it takes for them to break into a lucrative market.

jacksnipe• 4 years ago

Best not to conflate ethics and privacy.

The most private digital world — one in which everything is e2e encrypted — is arguably totally ethical (impossible for anybody to infringe on your personal rights) or the least ethical state of affairs imaginable (free for all for criminals, terrorists, etc…).

anon4002323• 4 years ago

Best not to conflate ethics and privacy.

Indeed. I'd suggest everyone in our industry study ethics, particularly with an eye towards its (i) philosophical foundations and (ii) cultural differences. If one of those underpinnings doesn't grab your interest, try the other.

There is a rich body of ethical writing around individual behavior. When that discussion starts to involve groups of people, ... yikes ... it becomes even more complex.

treeman79• 4 years ago

Also threatening to ban twitter for allowing freedom of speech.

gtvwill• 4 years ago

Lol the presence of apple hardware is literally a litmus test for how much an individual gives a shit about ethics particularly in tech and employment ethics. They aren't graded well if they buy apple. Applies 10x if they actually work in tech. Use it to your advantage.

kosherhurricane• 4 years ago

Capitalism giveth, and capitalism taketh it away. -KosherHurticane

duxup• 4 years ago

I still like them for privacy for my use case.

Beyond that is there a better company that operates in China that is doing better?

rosnd• 4 years ago

suicide nets

Like the ones installed all over Europe and the US?

Netherlands for example also does suicide nets, here's one in a small town city hall https://www.tubantia.nl/almelo/anti-zelfmoordnetten-geplaats...

xwdv• 4 years ago

If you think they’re fucked, you don’t know what a fucked company is. Twitter is fucked. Apple is thriving, selling massive amounts of products and sitting on a huge cash horde. Get a grip.

esskay5• 4 years ago

They are fucked as a company

Their profit margin would suggest otherwise.

ben_w• 4 years ago

I don't trust any mega-corporation very far these days. That said:

the suicide nets

I know this was painted as a scandal, but was it actually?

First, at the time Foxconn — or rather more specifically, Longhua Science and Technology Park, which was the site of the suicides that got in the news — was employing approximately 50-80% the population of Wyoming at the time depending on who you ask. For reference, there were 170 deaths by suicide in Wyoming in 2019.

Second, I've seen anti-fall nets on the inside of the Galeria department store in Alexanderplatz Berlin, which has no relevant reputation I've ever heard of, and therefore seems like a straightforward health and safety measure.

sneak3• 4 years ago

The per-capita suicide rate at the building with the suicide nets (before the nets went up) was half the per-capita suicide rate in the entire province in which the building is situated.

It's agenda-based narrative pushing.

anon4002323• 4 years ago

I don’t ever want to hear again how Apple is some champion of privacy and ethics.

It is easy to criticize an organizations' behavior.

It is easy to criticize someone else's ethics.

What are your ethics? What would you do if you were in Tim Cook's position?

Why? I'd like to see how you perceive the options available.

As for me, the following is an open question: can organizations have something analogous to a conscience? How does it work?

lazyeye5• 4 years ago

I guess this is the kind of blind obedience to an authoritarian regime that 275 billion dollars gets you

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...

But never mind, they have rainbow hashtags and censor pepe memes so they are the good guys...

lazyeye5• 4 years ago

I note the downvotes on this post.

Silicon valley people are not our friends.

adam_arthur2• 4 years ago

It actually blows my mind how many Apple zombies exist out there. 99% of them would chastise Microsoft for doing similar things in the 90s/2000s with Windows.

xpe13• 4 years ago

Or perhaps your comment is not considered useful. Be open to the possibility that you can share interests with people that criticize you.

I guess this is the kind of blind obedience to an authoritarian regime that 275 billion dollars gets you https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi... But never mind, they have rainbow hashtags and censor pepe memes so they are the good guys...

Speaking for myself (no comment on if I downvoted or not), I tend to not value exaggerations such as "blind obedience". That is not what is happening here. We are seeing parts of a complex power dynamic between a superpower and supercorporation. Dumbing it down is insulting to this audience.

elicash7• 4 years ago

I remember in Hong Kong that protesters used a bluetooth app (Bridgefy and maybe others) to communicate.

tinglymintyfrsh• 4 years ago

IIRC, Firechat was The Thing for PRC and Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat

Sessions is better than Signal since it doesn't require a phone number. IYAM, it should add Android + iOS serverless&internetless BT support.

idlewords• 4 years ago

AirDrop was frequently used in Hong Kong, but by far the most popular app for protest stuff was Telegram. There was also a widely used protest website.

For what it's worth, Apple also took down a crowdsourced map from the app store that helped people avoid areas with tear gas and heavy police activity, on the grounds that it was somehow endangering the cops. Very shady stuff.

friedman232• 4 years ago

Apple is a deeply evil company.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

Even if they really did this motivated by avoiding spam, the fact that dissidents were (not just hypothetically) using it to organize is literally a reason to leave it.

But rolling it out to China first is pretty damn suspicious of what their "true" motives were too.

mikysco• 4 years ago

It's difficult to defend Apple in this scenario but Apple's relationship with China is just like every other company's (western or otherwise) - at the end of the day, China holds all the cards. If you don't bow to their authoritarian edict, you are kicked out of the country.

The energy and anger should (as per usual) be directed at China and the Chinese communist party to a much greater degree than Apple.

I'm assuming, of course, that Apple was forced to make this update. Hard for me to believe they proactively made this freedom-violating, protest-suppressing change.

josteink• 4 years ago

If you don't bow to their authoritarian edict, you are kicked out of the country.

Apple, of all companies, can probably afford to do that though.

But they keep on doing business there. That’s a bit depressing.

(Written on my iPhone)

falcolas9• 4 years ago

The reason is the same one that most electronics companies (and certainly most cell phone brands) do business in China:

It's cheap.

Cheap labor, few/no penalties for pollution, abundant cheap electricity, inexpensive labor safety, etc.

It's the dream of outsourcing realized.

acdha4• 4 years ago

I don’t know how current it is, but Bunnie Huang wrote a series of posts in the 2000s about what it was like building things in China. It was more than just being cheap, and non-trivial to replicate elsewhere (one memorable quote: “I hadn’t seen blind dedication like this since I worked with the autonomous underwater robotics team at MIT”).

Here’s the first one:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=183

mhoad6• 4 years ago

This is a breathtakingly naive take. Like yes sure, get mad at the CCP but Apple have a long history of shit like this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

HardlyCurious2• 4 years ago

We need sanctions. You can't expect corporations to wage international campaigns for human rights, nor do we want that corporations to exercise such power.

We need govt action.

asdff• 4 years ago

They should implement that in the U.S. too. Plenty of people are getting laughs sitting in public looking for phones to airdrop anything from dumb memes to straight up porn onto.

falcolas9• 4 years ago

Sounds like a fine option, but it should not be the only option (as it is displayed in the tweets).

mensetmanusman3• 4 years ago

More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33768185

sfusato2• 4 years ago

Apple's relationship with China is a colossal liability.

intrasight• 4 years ago

China's relationship with everyone else is a larger liability.

xpe13• 4 years ago

Your suggested alternatives Apple should consider?

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

Taiwan.

macinjosh• 4 years ago

When I signed up for this site 12 years ago I was a huge Apple fan and almost steered my web dev career into iOS dev. Really glad I didn't do that, but also wish I could change my HN username now!

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

Likewise. People should watch Apple's famous 1984 commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIE-5hg7FoA

Apple is not the same company it claimed to be back then. Dare I say Apple today is now the company they were against back then.

gruturo• 4 years ago

While there's no UI for this, you can email the HN admins for a username change.

huslage• 4 years ago

In what way does this censor anyone? Censorship would be Apple disabling Airdrop altogether, not coming up with some compromise so that its users could still do their work.

blamazon6• 4 years ago

Imagine you want to invite a lot of people you don't know, to a protest. This is generally really difficult to do in China without being spotted for re-education. In contrast, Airdrop was previously a good way to do this discreetly. Now it's useless. That is censorship.

dymk3• 4 years ago

Doesn’t seem useless, seems like a good way to make sure people aren’t broadcasting PII by default if they leave “everybody” on.

karaterobot3• 4 years ago

If you buy Apple products and call for Apple to change their behavior, it will have much less of an effect on their decision making than if you stopped buying their products.

xpe13• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I'm following the options you are comparing.

(A) keep buying and criticize

(B) stop buying

Correct?

What am I missing here? (B) has a bigger impact and sends a bigger signal. Right? Talk is cheap. Leaving the Apple ecosystem is hard and demonstrates a very serious complaint.

karaterobot3• 4 years ago

A. Criticize but keep buying

B. Criticize and stop buying

exabrial• 4 years ago

* Apple is not a green company

* Apple is not a free speech advocate

* Apple builds their products with unethical labor

kmeisthax2• 4 years ago

Neither is Tesla.

Musk does not give a shit about the free speech of left-wingers. Tesla's also even more in bed with China than Apple is; both in terms of exploitative labor practices and China owning their demand. And electric vehicles are just a way to greenwash suburbs.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got confused with another thread that was talking about Tesla. Leaving this comment up for posterity.

mym19902• 4 years ago

Musk showed some true colors with the Twitter debacle, my interest in buying a Tesla went from an 8/10 to a 0.

jansan• 4 years ago

Apple is about money, nothing else. Look at their quarterly reports, they are not a byproduct of a higher ethics or anything

slig• 4 years ago

But, hey, at least they removed the phone charger and there's no plastic inside their product's boxes.

xpe13• 4 years ago

Nothing else? The profit motive ("money") drives a _lot_, but does not explain everything. Different companies make different trade-offs; there are various ways to optimize profit for different audiences with different risk profiles.

My point? Don't oversimplify. Few (any?) people here are claiming that ethics are the key driver. We know the PR and ads are a veneer. But there is no need to exaggerate.

It is clear that in addition to making money, Apple wants to project a certain brand and ethos, not to mention a penchant for big moves. At times, they are willing to risk some profit in order to invest in, say, a new processor technology.

WRT "explanation" / ie interpreting the why behind actions ... Not all large companies make those kind of investments or take these kind of risks. Saying "money" is the only driver fails to account for much of Apple's storied history.

Not to mention prediction... Saying that the profit motive is the best or only way to explain Apple (and many other companies) defies multivariate statistics and won't serve well to predict the future.

racl1012• 4 years ago

Technically speaking none of these giant corporations are "our friend". They are with the people until their bottom line is impacted / threatened. Frankly, I'm not surprised.

nichohel• 4 years ago

Is this possibly protective to the user?

SV_BubbleTime• 4 years ago

It is plausible to track people using airdrop. This move does also protect protest attendees who can still turn airdrop on when they think they want to receive things.

But cause and effect and consequence is for other people to jabber about.

I’m not some massive hypocrite like others here. I have Apple products, I don’t need to love Apple. I think the alternative is worse, but that doesn’t mean I need to get into an off-topic rant about how Elon is being mean… because somehow that organically keeps coming up.

I would Apple to act in the best interest of their customers. This move is at least some percentage that.

khazhoux6• 4 years ago

I got AirDrop spammed at the airport just recently, after accidentally leaving it enabled for Everyone. I can only imagine what the video contained if I'd clicked on it...

gorkish6• 4 years ago

I have to admit that when you actually look at the details this is a rather perplexing change. Ditto for reading the comments here.

Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder.

I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, including for the people who are using it to exchange information during protests since it disables a vector for tracking devices.

droopyEyelids• 4 years ago

Also, anyone who rides public transportation in a major metropolitan area has probably experienced perverts airdropping them pornography, and this would fix that issue.

HDThoreaun• 4 years ago

I have not experienced this in my 10 years on the subway.

kgermino• 4 years ago

Do you ride public transportation in a major metropolitan area? This is not a thing I've ever even heard of happening (I'm sure someone has done it) in the real world

sfusato2• 4 years ago

Why is it being rolled out in China first?

MBCook4• 4 years ago

Because China told them to after protests last month or so. This did not just happen in the last two days.

This is arguably a good setting too, as there are plenty of stories of people in other parts of the world who AirDrop lewd/violent/disgusting pictures to anyone around with their phone set to “allow anyone”. It’s happened on planes, for example.

But this is a tool people figured out they could use for a different purpose: spreading info during protests. So now it’s caught up in politics.

For all the “evil Apple”, they’ve been better than others. But they are a total hostage. The vast majority of the stuff is in China. Piss off the CCP and the company practically dies overnight.

Yes, they should have fixed that long ago. But here we are.

lordofgibbons3• 4 years ago

If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually.

That can already be done using cell towers (especially with 5G) and GPS enabled state-supervised apps like WeChat, etc. So that's not a good reason.

dymk3• 4 years ago

If only iPhones had a way to turn off its cellular radio, some kind of “airplane mode” or something

kelnos4• 4 years ago

Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change?

I don't think Apple is Pro-CCP, Apple is Pro-Being-Able-To-Do-Business-In-China, which means doing whatever the CCP tells you to do, even if it means compromising your ethics.

dkokelley3• 4 years ago

At the risk of being an Apple apologist, their manufacturing is effectively held hostage by China. Yes Apple is taking the "make more profit" choice, but the alternative is pretty devastating to the company. Long term, Apple needs to diversify their manufacturing footprint.

(Note that I still think Apple would adhere to the CCP's requests/laws just to be able to sell in China. China would ban Apple products if they believed Apple was not cooperative.)

user3939382• 4 years ago

compromising your ethics

My more cynical view is that there are no ethics to compromise. The ethic is make money. Any appearance of ethics is there as a marketing gimmick.

flumpcakes3• 4 years ago

compromising your ethics

Is disabling a feature for all citizens within a geographical region "compromising your ethics" I would argue not. Different countries have different laws, including what kind of radio spectrum a phone is able to use. These have to be respected. As distasteful as it is, "respecting" the laws of an autocratic country.

Now if Apple was handing over geolocation information for apple users on bulk to the CCP, or compiling lists of "likely" dissidents or <insert-minority-group> then I think we are at least knee-deep in unethical waters. But they'll probably be some people out there who say Apple-the-company is completely ethical unless they themselves are the ones pulling the trigger. I kind of disagree on this outlook, but legally again they might be right. (If you take your ethical/moral bases on that of current law.)

miguelazo2• 4 years ago

How does this actually limit the dissemination of information? You have 10 minutes, and then can reinitiate? Seems like a reasonable security precaution.

ChicagoBoy11• 4 years ago

I'm an educator and one thing that's actually been happening is some of our older kids will see school buses out on the road and will just try to airdrop obscene content to kids ON the bus. We had literally talked about hoping there could be some default "off" behavior for airdrop, so this actually will (at least for me) be a welcome change in behavior!

miguelazo2• 4 years ago

Yes, this has been a problem on public transportation for years.

stingrae• 4 years ago

That is a good reason to have airdrop default to off but not a good reason to remove always on, if you want it.

mym19902• 4 years ago

I am wondering if there is pattern recognition that the Chinese government can access where you can see people constantly toggling AirDrop and identify them for prosecution.

mikkelam• 4 years ago

I assume that this is the CCP asking apple to do this or get banned from China. What should apple do instead? I'm curious what people think, it's a tough spot to be in obviously.

2muchcoffeeman6• 4 years ago

We heard about this over 2 weeks ago https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/10/airdrop-10-minute-limit...

This is not in response to this particular protest. iOS16 just dropped, so the timing was coincidental I guess.

ed25519FUUU• 4 years ago

If you don’t believe this is in response to protest then how do you explain it being rushed out ONLY IN CHINA?

2muchcoffeeman6• 4 years ago

I said "This is not in response to this particular protest."

This already existed. They did not see the current protest and then suddenly released it.

lopkeny12ko• 4 years ago

When you work on software available globally, it's very normal to deploy or roll out features region-by-region. This seems par for the course.

altairprime• 4 years ago

No one can explain the confidential-NDA internal workings of Apple in this forum, but here’s a constructed, plausible, scenario that contradicts the claim “Apple implemented this for China”:

If Apple was planning to release this in a point release of iOS 16, and then the Chinese government asked them to do something, then they could have said: “We have a feature in testing that we’d planned to ship later this cycle, so we’ll push that up and soft launch it in China first and then roll it out worldwide once any bugs are hammered out.”

This constructed example both satisfies the condition “why China first?” and also contradicts the assertion “it is certain that Apple implemented this at China’s request”. It is not known whether or not, and to what degree, that Apple considered and/or acted upon a request from China.

(It is also very unlikely that China requested this “after 10 minutes” option specifically. China would rather not have unmonitored peer-to-peer communications, and Apple tends to include temporary timers in their UI for RF/GPS features.)

jeffbee• 4 years ago

iOS 16 came out months ago.

2muchcoffeeman6• 4 years ago

Did it? OK. I don't keep up with the release dates anymore. But I just got the notifications on my iPhone and iPad literally last week. I've only been on 16 for a few days.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

I realize apple hates options, but adding a 4th option to leave it as everyone indefinitely would have been sooo easy. And I see people were commenting about the protests as a motivating factor 2 weeks ago in that story.

MBCook4• 4 years ago

When the CCP says “take that option off phones in China”, you do. Because if you don’t those hundreds of millions of devices they produce for you every year may stop being produced. Or find a new $500/each tariff on them. Or some other company killing thing.

Apple should have hedged years ago, now they’re stuck.

MBCook4• 4 years ago

Right. It was a response to a previous protest.

But it gets far more clicks today than weeks ago.

matthewdgreen2• 4 years ago

I'm not an expert on China, but my understanding is that there has been a wave of protests over the past several months/weeks in which Airdrop has been used to disseminate protest materials. The intensity of the protests has ebbed/flowed, and they are happening in many different locations. Even "the current protest" is not well defined: there are currently many different protests that share a common grievance, happening in different cities across China.

Being pedantic about whether this was was a response to "a previous protest" is like arguing about which specific mosquito caused you to put on bug spray.

jdmoreira3• 4 years ago

are people really surprised the world biggest corporation has to cave to the worlds second largest economy? What do people expect really? Do people even understand the kind of incentives at play here?

What does this have to do with the quality of their products?

Apple is an artificial entity, a corporation and it's only loyalty by design is with the wallets of it's shareholders.

What's surprising about this?

lemondice• 4 years ago

In actual practice corporations are only loyal to the board of directors and the officers. Shareholders are just the suckers used to jack up the share price.

jdmoreira3• 4 years ago

You are right of course. But by definition of the law / "algorithm", it should be all shareholders

cageface• 4 years ago

The difference is Apple insists on removing most of the user's control over their device, which makes it an ideal target for authoritarian regimes. Android gives you more control and more options.

rurp2• 4 years ago

Well for one thing, many people seem to believe Tim Cook and other individuals at Apple when they say things like "We believe privacy is a human right". It's worthwhile to point out some of the examples of their actions being contrary to their words.

jdmoreira3• 4 years ago

Those people are naive and have never heard of PR and "spin"

kkfx• 4 years ago

Two notes: before scream against Apple remember a thing: a company MUST legally comply with States rules where it exists. Witch means: Apple, based in USA, must allow USA authority access anything on their servers AND Apple in China must respect local laws, EVENTUALLY doing various gimmick to respect both.

The lesson here is not finger point "someone evil" but finger point the use of proprietary software and services. Theater like "Apple do not decrypt phones for FBI" or "Apple censor Chinese Citizens" etc are theater. The reality is that IF you are a company you comply with local laws. If you just publish free software, NOT services, the end user must, formally, comply with local laws.

Sorry for my poor English, not my mother tongue, but I think the concept is pretty simple and anyone with a bit of IT knowledge must know that AND HAVE ALREADY accepted such reality.

For Democracy we can't allow proprietary software nor black boxes. No matter if domestically made or not. Is someone with an IT background do find this as extreme and even criticize Apple for it's choice must stop and think a bit: it's an hypocritical behavior even if genuine.

shellcromancer• 4 years ago

Regardless of where it's rolled out first, this is a good example of reducing the attack surface from remote exploits (which China is known to have and use at contests like Tianfu Cup). Seems in line with changes they made with "Lockdown Mode" that users can opt into.

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

I'm a little confused by the "Apple's doing bad here" sentiment. The easier to implement, and definitely more effective solution would have been to just disable the Everyone feature completely. Just remove it from the menu. This would have been something like

    action.isEnabled = self.isInChina

Instead, they went through the effort to actually make it still there, but time bombed. They had to add a timeout function, and record the time it was enabled, etc. And at the end of the day, the activist/protestor at a street gathering now has the inconvenience of re-enabling "everyone" 6 times an hour.

For me, this basically feels like lip service to the Chinese government, but otherwise a finger. Maybe I'm beeing too myopic.

killjoywashere• 4 years ago

Yeah, I quite agree. Reposting my comment from above here because this makes a better thread ... I think this 10 minute delay might actually be intended to be protective for the protestors. Any radio transmitter is a beacon that can be localized and destroyed. In serious warfare this is a major issue. "I'm up, they see me, I'm down" is drilled into military operators early and often.

randyrand2• 4 years ago

You think Apple is trying to protect protestors?

Do you know which country manufactures the iPhone?

Apple is not suicidal.

ralfd2• 4 years ago

For me, this basically feels like lip service to the Chinese government, but otherwise a finger. Maybe I'm beeing too myopic.

Plus they led everyone know about China in rolling the feature change there first.

2muchcoffeeman6• 4 years ago

I guess it works both ways though. If everyone had it on, you can't easily arrest every iPhone user. And people could spread information really quickly. Now you have to turn it on for 10 minutes at a time so you aren't organising that mass protest as fast.

andromeduck4• 4 years ago

The main use case here is sending stuff in high traffic places w/ plausible deniability such as during your commute or at a mall.

mensetmanusman3• 4 years ago

No, that’s a silly solution because airdrop everyone is super useful.

baxtr5• 4 years ago

Ok, so people jump directly to the conclusion that this was introduced because the CCP asked for it. Yet, if that was the case why limit it only? Why not ask for a complete stop? Is there a case where a protestor benefits from AirDrop but only if it’s more than 10 minutes?

blamazon6• 4 years ago

It's pretty simple: sometimes people do want to receive airdrops from anybody in a state approved way - when someone is not your contact, but you want them to send you something. Your distant uncle took a photo at a family gathering, for example.

Thus, previously, users in China could set their phone to be able to receive airdrops from anybody, all the time.

But, problem! Now they can receive information antithetical to CCP propaganda, anywhere they go. On a bus, on a train, at the supermarket, at a grocery store, literally anywhere, they could be exposed to ad-hoc free thought via airdrop. Perhaps something like: "protest tonight at the grocery store! They can't arrest all of us!"

In response, now iPhone users in China can still choose to receive airdrops from anybody, preserving the valid use case, but only for 10 minutes after pressing the button. They are now safe from uncensored information for the rest of the day. Train, bus, supermarket, etc. The airdrop protest invite is now dead.

A complete ban of receiving airdrops from anyone would cause outrage - it would be removing a useful feature entirely. But the timer is a clever way to neuter its position as a social communication platform without taking the useful feature away.

This is how effective social control works - you can't just shackle everyone, you have to give them the impression of freedom.

baxtr5• 4 years ago

Sorry. That’s not convincing. How can a 10min limit suppress protests? You’re not answering the question, just telling a story.

jtuple• 4 years ago

It's a 10 minute limit on receiving, which needs manual intervention to reset.

That pretty much kills Airdrop as an open P2P communication channel (the "undesired" usage) while still enabling one off intentional file transfers (the primary Airdrop use case).

So a 10 minute limit easily kills 99% of "bad" usage without impacting common usage, leading to less resistance/complaints from average users. Killing Airdrop full stop would have greater push back/outrage, with only marginal improvement against the undesired usage.

Q: How does 10 min limit kill the P2P communciation usage?

A: Imagine your cell phone could only receive calls from non-contacts for 10 min. After which you had to remember to push a button to re-allow calls for another 10m, rinse/repeat. With that UX, the chance you ever successfully call or be called by a non-contact is near zero. People wouldn't opt-in frequently enough to have a reliable network.

victorbstan• 4 years ago

Another reply said it was coming because of spam. Can this be verified. I’m suspicious of triggered woke/knee jer reaction twitter posts as any source of reliable info.

rib3ye2• 4 years ago

Just google "airdrop spam". It's well-publicized.

rib3ye2• 4 years ago

This is in response to people spamming AirDrop, a common complaint. Don't jump to conclusions.

throwaway829• 4 years ago

If that were true, Apple would just add limiting Airdrop to 10 minutes as an additional default option. Removing Always on airdrop was done because it's the only form of community communications that doesn't go through the Censors.

khazhoux6• 4 years ago

Apple changes features and removes configurations ("simplifies") all the time. They have a strong bias towards not adding options.

throwaway29812• 4 years ago

You could just turn it off (as it is by default).

smoldesu5• 4 years ago

Just a coincidence that this gets rolled out 9 years after Airdrop debuted.

khazhoux6• 4 years ago

That's literally the definition of coincidence: unrelated things happening at the same time.

tinus_hn• 4 years ago

Oh, the good ole days, when Apple was bad because they allowed people to Airdrop crash pictures to random people, like pilots and fellow passengers

rchaud3• 4 years ago

Time for a new operating system (if we didn't already hit that mark with the 2013 NSA leaks).

Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei: they all exist at the pleasure of the state. Please ignore their glitzy PR-laden presentations about protecting people's privacy and upholding human rights. They will sell you out in a second if it's convenient.

On the mobile side of things, we need, at the barest minimum:

- a web based OS with granular permissions for any application that needs to access hardware APIs (just like a web browser)

- a general-purpose mobile SOC that hasn't hitched its wagon to Samsung/Apple/Huawei orders.

- FairPhone style modular, user replaceable parts, and to encourage an interest in self-repair.

- no native-app lock-ins. it's not 2007, the majority of apps people use run fine on a mobile web browser.

- significant efforts to fund tech literacy. More than a billion people have smartphones as their first computing device. They don't have the benefit of past knowledge, so they simply accept the locked-down nature of smartphones without question. Meanwhile in 2011, we could openly port Windows Phone 7, Android OS and the original Windows Mobile 6.5 on the same phone.

jrajav• 4 years ago

Does this not all exist already in the form of Pinephone and Firefox OS?

rchaud3• 4 years ago

FFOS was discontinued in 2015. Pinephone is an option however.

azangru• 4 years ago

One could argue that Firefox OS does not exist at all.

sergiotapia• 4 years ago

This sounds like https://serenityos.org/

monocasa• 4 years ago

As much as I love serenity, I think the parent is talking about a mobile OS.

Mikeb854• 4 years ago

At least Google and Samsung don't give in to dictatorships. Yes, hypothetically the US and South Korea hold some power over them... However Google has stood up to Russia, China and others. Unlike Apple...

yuy9106162• 4 years ago

I'd somewhat hesitate to give out credit like that. It's more of that China kicked out Google, thus freeing Google to "stand up" to the CCP. I would love to see more of an example where a company had a lot on the line and still oppose the CCP

fabrika• 4 years ago

No, Google never stood up to Russia. A year ago they blocked a perfectly legal list of candidates published by Navalny team.

sneak3• 4 years ago

If Apple breaks Chinese law in any big or meaningful way... there is no iPhone 15. Full stop. Apple is dead in the water without their CCP-jurisdiction manufacturing which produces approximately 100% of their products (and all of their biggest moneymakers).

lovvtide3• 4 years ago

I would add:

- The ability to send push notifications without replying on GCM/APN

- Support for mesh networking (multiple low power peer connections)

- Convenient "lockdown" mode that encrypts your phone's contents for international travel

- Included hardware wallet/keystore for signing all data that you upload to social media

joosters• 4 years ago

Is it even possible to do push notifications without relying on a centralized system (Google, Apple, or whoever)? Sounds like a very difficult problem to solve while preventing privacy leaks, spamming, DOS attacks and still being reliable and globally available. Who would pay for the infrastructure?

(Please, no 'blockchain will solve this' answers!)

akvadrako• 4 years ago

Push is already possible with https://unifiedpush.org/. Apps use a local API and you choose the push provider.

fsflover3• 4 years ago

You might like Librem 5 phone with the smart card running GNU/Linux.

kube-system4• 4 years ago

The operating system is not the missing part of the puzzle. There are plenty of FOSS operating systems already.

The missing part of the puzzle is that phones are much more than an OS. To get a phone, you need an SOC, baseband, drivers, regulatory approval, manufacturing, etc. Those are the missing parts.

I think it's a pretty futile effort to make a completely open phone. Even the richest companies on the planet outsource much of the above. Pretty much every previous effort to make an open phone has failed to make much of anything open beyond the OS, let alone all of it.

fsflover3• 4 years ago

I think it's a pretty futile effort to make a completely open phone.

No, it's not: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

guelo• 4 years ago

You don't need a whole new OS, Android is open source and can be forked. The problem is that people's expectation of polish on their phones is through the roof and nobody has figured out how to fund that kind of development effort. CyanogenMod came close but was torn apart, though LineageOS is still there.

In my opinion LineageOS should ditch the neverending cycle of trying to keep up with Google's increasingly useless Android releases, just pick a branch point and leave Google behind. It's the only way to implement OS features and be able to maintain them going forward. Then they should focus on features users actually want and that Google would never implement, for example OS level adblock and firewalls.

Instead of other existing attempts that focus on nebulous privacy and security, things that users don't really care about, the focus should be on giving users back the control that Google and Apple have taken away from us. Note that user-control and security can often be seen as being at odds. An OS that chooses user-control could be a strong differentiator that would set it apart from Google/Apple, who always frame their removal of user-control as a security/privacy feature.

But still, the tricky bit is figuring out a funding model.

yamtaddle11• 4 years ago

a web based OS

I consider decent battery life and a low-latency interface table stakes for a mobile OS. I'd regard the floor for this as Android, though I'm only setting it that low to avoid charges of being contrary (I'm not happy with how much iOS has slipped on this, even, especially latency/responsiveness). It would be billionaire-mintingly novel if a team managed to clear that bar with webtech.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

Regarding low latency, one of the reasons FF OS failed it was laggy on 2014-era mobile web APIs and device hardware. That's definitely not the case today.

neodypsis• 4 years ago

Should all iOS users enable Lockdown-mode in protest?

pshirshov2• 4 years ago

Well, after that image scanning story I've switched to Android with CalyxOS and later migrated to GrapheneOS. Also migrated most of my workflows from MacOS to NixOS. Can't be happier.

It's not painful at all to drop Apple phones. And the only thing which is constantly bugging me on NixOS desktop is totally inconsistent hotkeys system. So, it's not that hard drop Apple, just do it.

fimdomeio• 4 years ago

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently...

notpachet• 4 years ago

... for 10 minutes

bb883• 4 years ago

... for a greater China

racl1012• 4 years ago

That was Steve Jobs' mantra. Not Tim Apple's. Different administration.

oblio• 4 years ago

Apple wasn't making and selling devices in China before Cook? Interesting.

ospider• 4 years ago

Jobs might just leave China.

grumple3• 4 years ago

AirDrop to everyone seems like a great idea until your teenager gets airdropped genital pics on an airplane [0].

0. https://jezebel.com/passengers-keep-airdropping-nudes-and-ai...

buildbot• 4 years ago

Someone did this to me, jokes on them, I know where they live now- airdrop does not strip exif location unless you tell it too :)

zanethomas2• 4 years ago

kow-tow to xi jing ping

Markoff• 4 years ago

it's been like this for weeks, this is not news

gnicholas• 4 years ago

Can someone make an automation that enables AirDrop for Everyone, waits 10 minutes, and then repeats?

dkokelley3• 4 years ago

The power dynamic between China and Apple doesn't get enough attention. Apple needs China, but China doesn't need Apple.

There are few if any places capable of manufacturing the amount of products China does for Apple, especially at the price. China is also an enormous market to Apple.

I don't agree with the treatment of protestors or the use of technology to surveil its citizens, but the bottom line is that in China, China calls the shots. Apple can either get in line or manufacture its phones elsewhere.

lazyeye5• 4 years ago

Agreed.

And maybe they should not take the high moral ground on other issues, telling others how to think and behave, when they themselves are happy to accept filthy lucre in return for compromising their own ethics.

I personally cannot stand these sleazy companies, happy to "take a stand" when it costs them nothing (cheap public relations!!!) but it's a "complicated world" and these issues are not simple, when they themselves bear the cost.

Seriously, they can go F themselves.

hellfish3• 4 years ago

I'm sick to death of seeing these corporations pretending to care about human rights, then doing stuff like this

Or pretending to care about the environment, then forcing people to buy new devices (with packaging) instead of repairing the ones they already own

Or pretending to care about privacy, then scanning local files for "undesirable content" (it doesn't matter what the content is, once the infra is there, it's there to stay)

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that whenever a corporation says something that sounds good, it's probably a lie.

The only thing that will ever force Apple's hand with regard to this human rights issue is legislation, they've lost the right to trust long ago

fleddr2• 4 years ago

Think Differently...and we will erase you.

fleddr2• 4 years ago

As they erased themselves, all their tweets deleted since somewhere in October :)

jbombadil• 4 years ago

Bit of a sidenote but I heard that in China iOS has a setting to disallow an app from accessing the internet (either wifi, cellular or both). Why can't that feature make it to the the rest of the world?

smoldesu5• 4 years ago

Because only China has the means to effectively backdoor it.

concinds2• 4 years ago

For context: AirDrop was one of the only ways protesters had to communicate en-masse.

Signal is unsafe for Chinese protesters, since it requires SMS verification upon signup and is therefore linked to your identity.[0] Mesh networks are the only real solution there, and AirDrop is about the only mainstream one. AirDrop has been used by Asian protesters for years.[1] I highly recomment you read the full China Digital Times article, which gives excellent context, and lets these protesters explain the value of AirDrop in their own words.[1]

Apple's timing is unmistakeably suspicious; keep in mind that there have been protests for weeks, which preceded the iOS update.

It must also be pointed out that Apple issued an official statement to Western media outlets that the goal was to prevent spam.[2] At no point did Apple ever admit that this was done to follow any government demand. It's unknown whether Apple could be under a Chinese gag-order, but we shouldn't speculate that it's the case unless experts say it's likely. If Apple is complying with a Chinese government orders, then it has an ethical duty to make that public, and again, we have, as of yet, no reason to assume there are gag orders related to this. Apple deserves criticism for the update, and for trying to hide its true purpose.

[0] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/159707255662827929...

[1] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/11/netizen-voices-apple-r...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/apple-lim...

jinseokim• 4 years ago

Note: AirDrop is unsafe for broadcasting message anonymously. It will also broadcast your hashed phone number and email[1], which can be reversed by rainbow table.

[1] https://privatedrop.github.io/

LinkLink• 4 years ago

True, but invalidated by burner and jailbroken phones which are widespread in China. They can definitely catch somebody with a concerted effort but I'd be surprised if the average Chinese teenager couldnt figure out how to make a burner email

krick2• 4 years ago

To be fair, it's the only real solution anywhere, and it's just us who is playing dumb and pretending SMS verification is absolutely fine and totally acceptable for a "secure messenger" in our free and happy democratic society. Jesus, the level of absurdity here...

DivineBicycle• 4 years ago

Signal can't be used at all in China anyway since the verification texts are blocked. I've tried contacting Signal support about this (I live in China and want to use Signal) but as soon as I tell them I love in China and have a Chinese phone number they stop replying :)

flumpcakes3• 4 years ago

ethical duty to make that public

There are gag orders in the US and UK too, which companies have to follow or they are breaking the law. Are they unethical too?

Or do you mean, it is unethical for apple to not tell Americans what the Chinese government has asked them to do within China, to Chinese citizens, in order to benefit from being legally in good standing and able to continue to do commerce within China?

If so, then is it unethical for them to follow US gag orders and not tell the Chinese public?

concinds2• 4 years ago

Please read the full sentence.

If Apple is complying with a Chinese government orders, then it has an ethical duty to make that public, and again, we have, as of yet, no reason to assume there are gag orders related to this.

I am saying that if there's no gag order, they have an ethical duty to reveal why they're doing this.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

Alright, who changed the title? It's now completely incorrect, because AirDrop is only limited to 10 minutes _in China_.

khazhoux6• 4 years ago

Any Apple employee (or really, any large-company employee) would agree that this change is months of work. From the original problem statement (people get spammed when they leave AirDrop set to Everyone), to many strongly-opinionated discussions on how to solve (There's not a problem; Pop up a reminder to disable after an hour; Enable only for some period of time [5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, user-configured]), and then arguments about how to phrase the UI (yes, even for something this small) and mock-ups and product reviews, and then development + QA and internal/Livability testing, and then coordinating for the actual iOS release.

It's a mountain of work, which would have kicked off a long time before any of these protests.

randyrand2• 4 years ago

I worked at Apple. It really depends on how big a change this is under the hood. iOS already has similar infrastructure for bluetooth toggles.

If it is low risk, it could make it into a dot release with minimal effort.

But yes, minimum time frame a month standard, maybe a couple weeks if it came from high up (which it did) and was time sensitive.

jsnell4• 4 years ago

And is it standard procedure for Apple to release these kinds of changes only in China? They're clearly putting massive priority on this change launching in that geography ASAP (for one reason or another), so it doesn't seem hard to believe that this bypassed most of their other process as well.

ipsum22• 4 years ago

Normally it would be several months of work, but if it was a top level company directive (e.g. from the CEO) it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum. Note that protests have been going on sporadically for this entire year.

See this article about a protest from Peking university from May 2022: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac...

and Shanghai in April 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents...

And in Henan in June 2022: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149

bb883• 4 years ago

it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum

Maybe even less than that. I can't imagine the prototype would take longer than a day.

stereoradonc• 4 years ago

When will the world Apple's duplicity? They are NOT private, secure or consumer friendly.

fishywang2• 4 years ago

The apple apologists in this thread is weird.

Sure the timing of this tweet is weird, as people pointed out, that the change actually happened a few weeks ago (there were tweets about it then, but those are mainly in Chinese). But protesting via airdrop has been happening in China for months before this change.

Even if we give Apple the benefit of doubt, that they actually planned this change long time ago unrelated to any protests (spams maybe), and the plan is to roll it out to a market for testing before roll out to all markets, with the protests they _should_ change the market for the test. Not changing the plan (that's _assuming_ they really have good intention aka fight spams behind it) will make themselves look bad and they have no one else to blame.

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

How are they using it?

Airdrop is based on proximity as measured by NFC and/or Bluetooth (?), and you can't use it as an ad hoc network mesh to route messages across it.(?)

So Activist Organizer 1 can't coordinate with Activist Organizer 2 3 km away using Airdrop unless activists in the space between forwards / routes messages in the right physical direction.

If they are well organized from the beginning, then each person (node) can forward each message to 3 - 5 contacts but that requires them to maintain physical formation during the activities.

I am not an expert on AirDrop, I am just trying to figure out how it helps out.

andromeduck4• 4 years ago

core organizers typically work in small cells, when an event is decided, that infor needs to filter out first artists/promoters which make the materials then to general public. airdrop is used for the last step, helping an event go viral by spreading material horizontally at high traffic areas like transit hubs and malls with some palusible deniablity. after a recipient recieves that info, they can then airdrop it to their own circle/cell or via word of mouth like normal.

diebeforei485• 4 years ago

Why 10 minutes? Why not "until tomorrow", which is how disconnecting from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth works from Control Center?

sneakerblack• 4 years ago

It says on the tweet: the aim of the update is to prevent people from sharing protest materials at protests. If you set it "until tomorrow", then they would still be able to share materials

maxdo• 4 years ago

And yet, all the media will be posting every day about Elon Musk decisions and how evil they are :)

AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes

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