The whole iMessage/RCS conversation is really only relevant in the US; in other countries basically everyone uses WhatsApp or Kakao or LINE or whatever the local favorite is. In the US, there is no industry-standard RCS. It's theoretically a carrier-based messaging service but all of the carriers outsourced it to Google so, as an alternative to iMessage, the option is a proprietary extension of RCS running on Google servers, something that is exactly as open as iMessage itself.
If you want a true industry standard way to send messages to people, the iPhone has had that since 2007: email.
Email doesn't even require a cellular plan to begin with but, again, the context of my comment is the US and the relative merits of iMessage vs. RCS. It's all just data. Who is using SMS over iMessage due to data plan costs? Unlimited cellular data plans are the default.
Industry-standard RCS does not support E2E encryption. Google's proprietary extension of RCS, which it operates, supports E2E encryption. As part of its marketing campaign for it, Google intentionally blurs the line between the theoretical open standard RCS, which nobody uses, and the real-world version of RCS that Google has implemented, which is not an open standard.
RCS the open standard is missing critical features. Google's implementation fixes that, but is not open. I don't think we should give a pass to RCS just because it's open. SMS is a legacy format but it's unconscionable these days to release a new messaging platform without E2E encryption. That's a minimum viable product feature, not a maybe nice to have in the future feature.
The western Allies and Soviets both actively took Germany, coming in from either side and meeting in the middle. They split the country because they were already there. The Soviet Union never really made it to Japan proper. They took over Manchuria and Japan surrendered ASAP to the US alone once it became obvious that the only alternative was to surrender to both powers later and likely be split like Germany.
It’s worth highlighting that this was the immediate impetus for surrender. The atomic bombs were basically non-factors.
I'm not really concerned at all with when Americans landed in Japan. The US unilaterally established air superiority over Japan and had successfully blockaded the country, bleeding it dry of oil. The Japanese mainland was functionally militarily defeated prior to any land forces making it there.
what do people think of the idea that if the U.S. had not dropped those bombs, a larger-scale nuclear exchange, possibly between the Soviets and the U.S., would have happened because no one would have seen the consequences in 1945.
I still think the use of the atomic bombs on Japan was inherently immoral and unjustifiable, but if I'm searching for at least some silver lining, I do think it's almost certainly true that if those two comparatively small bombs weren't dropped then, more and larger bombs would have been dropped later.
This is such a lazy, dumb take. Nobody even complains about Cortana because nobody used it in the first place. People complain about Siri precisely because so many people are using is so often that they inevitably come up against its shortcomings. It can certainly continue to grow and evolve but it’s a real-world useful tool today.
IIRC in Seattle it effectively depends on whether anyone cares enough to report you. If your neighbors don’t mind you gardening naked in your front yard then you’re fine. If they gripe about it then you have to put clothes on.
That’s not the case. You do not have to put on clothes just because your neighbors don’t like it. Gardening nude is fully legal even if someone complains.
Nudity itself is not obscene, only obscene actions can make it obscene.
They’re slowly transitioning into the type of megacorp you usually only see in science fiction.
Apple isn't technically a bank in this case, but even if they were, it's pretty common and not at all a dystopian sci-fi thing. Sony owns a bank. Hyundai owns a bank. In the US, GM made a bank over a century ago, spun it off in 2006 (it's now called Ally), realized that was a mistake, and bought an existing bank in 2010.
I can’t fathom any reason why Tim Cook himself would even talk to him. In Musk’s mind, they’re both CEOs so on the same level, but he’s more on the level of one of Eddy Cue’s subordinates. Maybe a VP would take the call? Or just punt it down to some director.
Canada will be the first nation to start printing warnings directly onto individual cigarettes in a bid to deter young people from starting smoking and encourage others to quit....
Why not just raise the age limit? Adults don't start smoking cigarettes; children do. Younger teens get them from older teens (friends and relatives). Lots of 15 year olds can find an 18 year old to buy them tobacco, but significantly fewer can find a 21 year old to do the same. Canada just needs to copy the US on this. It's simple, highly effective, and can be enacted immediately without any required delay to allow for changes at the factory.
Voting to send Ukraine all of the weapons and resources they can possibly use. That is the only legitimate anti-war stance. It's a remarkably black and white scenario where an authoritarian country invaded its democratic neighbor. Russia could end the war immediately simply by leaving. Ukraine, on the other hand, needs to actually win the war. Anything other than an absolute Ukrainian victory where Russia is forced out of all of Ukraine is a victory for war. The real-world anti-war position is that war must not be allowed to be an effective means of aggression. If war works, we get more war. When dictators learn that war doesn't work, we'll have less war. As long as Putin isn't willing to pull back his soldiers and abandon all claims to all Ukrainian land, the only other option is to defeat him in battle.
Anybody who opposes arming Ukraine is objectively pro-war because the only plausible outcome in that scenario is a Russian victory.
This is the same News Corp. that convinced the Australian government that Facebook owes them money whenever anybody (including News Corp. itself) shares a link on Facebook to one of their articles, all with the justification that a link tax was needed in order to fund journalism.
Developers are going to hate this, but it’s good for the rest of us.
Some, but not all. There's no reason a developer should have to explain why they're using UserDefaults. It's a local-only place for storing very small amounts of data. The data is created in the app and read only within the app. There are no privacy or other concerns in its use. It's just a tedious waste of everyone's time to provide a reason.
Lina Khan's stewardship of the FTC has been one of high-profile failures, clumsily targeting big companies over things that are, in fact, legal. It's like she thinks she's a senator trying to win political points with cheap, lazy shots rather than being the head of a wonky enforcement agency. Fresh after failing to block Microsoft's purchase of Activision, she's now targeting Prime, a service that consumers overwhelmingly actually like. I have no doubt that Amazon likely has violated antitrust law in some ways, but I have no faith in Khan's FTC to actually target the legitimate violations with boring, relatively minor solutions. They'll overshoot and bungle the whole thing, yet again.
For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed...
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.
Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.
The Trump ally's acknowledgment came in a filing Tuesday related to the 2020 election workers' lawsuit about baseless claims of fraud that he made against them.
This headline is, ironically, false. This is a nolo contendre (“I do not wish to contend”) stipulation. He’s saying that he does not actually admit to making the false statements, but he has no defense to offer the court (because he of course absolutely did make the false statements), so he’s willing to just accept whatever punishment comes with it. The major benefit for him is that it applies only to this specific case, whereas if he actually admitted his guilt to the court, that would then be an established fact that could be used in other cases.
Because he's neither technically admitting that he did it nor will it be proven in court that he did it. He's saying, "For the sake of this case only, let's just assume I did it and act accordingly." If he told the court "I did it" then everyone else in other cases could just point to that and not even need to prove it in the first place.
As most of the Lemmy users are security/privacy minded, after a question about alternative voices I’m wondering. Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly? (Especially when you don’t need to due to other limitations)...
Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly?
Because it’s not? A low-power process on my phone is listening for the wake word. When it hears other stuff, it ignores it. When it hears the wake word, it processes my request, tied to a separate anonymous identifier used only for Siri itself. I’m not really losing any privacy at all.
And as a side note, is there a way to kill Siri completely on IOS (not just go trough all app settings and disable siri there)?
It’s just the first two toggles (Listen for “Hey Siri” and Press Side Button for Siri) in the Siri & Search menu that you’d need to turn off. There’s not much to it.
Twitter is transforming into X, as the site’s former bird logo has now been replaced by an official new X logo. Elon Musk, who owns the transformed social media site, began signaling the change early Sunday morning with a series of tweets, starting with one that said, “and soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and,...
US copyright law doesn't allow for protection of something like that. A dingbat, yes, but if it's very plainly recognizable as an X then the exact shape and output of that typeface isn't protectable. You can even print out a font, scan it, and create a new copycat font from it. The only thing you can't do is reproduce the actual typeface file itself, which is fundamentally a single copyrighted piece of software. Some other countries allow more protection on the shapes of individual letters, but I don't think you'd ever win a case anywhere on such a simple geometric shape as this X.
They moved the storage of encryption keys for Chinese users to servers in China instead of shutting down iMessage and Facetime.
These are totally separate things. Apple users in China can still use iMessage and FaceTime and those are still end-to-end encrypted. If you choose to store your iMessages in iCloud, those can be accessed by the government, but that's the same as they can in every other country. The UK's proposal is to directly break the security of iMessage itself, something worse than what China has done.
They still intended to start scanning your photos and that is worrying.
They wanted to scan photos stored in iCloud. Apple has an entirely legitimate interest in not storing CSAM on their servers. Instead of doing it like every other photo service does, which scans all of your photos on the server, they created a complex privacy-preserving method to do an initial scan on device as part of the upload process and, through the magic of math, these would only get matched as CSAM on the server if they were confident (one in a trillion false-positives) you were uploading literally dozens of CSAM images, at which point they'd then have a person verify to make absolutely certain, and then finally report your crime.
The system would do the seemingly impossible of preserving the privacy of literally everybody except the people that everyone agrees don't deserve it. If you didn't upload a bunch of CSAM, Apple itself would legitimately never scan your images. The scan happened on device and the match happened in the cloud, and only if there were a enough matches to guarantee confidence. It's honestly brilliant but people freaked out after a relentless FUD campaign, including from people and organizations who absolutely should know better.
USB-C confirmed for the iPhone 15 in new leaked part images (www.macworld.com)
deleted_by_author
Cortana, once a flagship feature of Windows phones, is slowly being shut down (arstechnica.com)
Microsoft shuts down Cortana, Apple should do the same with Siri (9to5mac.com)
Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant, which was introduced in 2014 back when Windows Phone was still a thing. Similar to...
Is it legal to be out in public in just underwear?
You’re not quite naked, but you’re not quite dressed either. Is it legal? I don’t know and I’ve always been curious.
More Than $10 Billion Deposited in Apple Card Savings Accounts (www.macrumors.com)
Elon Musk says he’s going to talk to Tim Cook about adjusting the Apple tax (www.theverge.com)
Elon Musk is going after Apple again.
Canada launches warning labels on each cigarette (www.bbc.com)
Canada will be the first nation to start printing warnings directly onto individual cigarettes in a bid to deter young people from starting smoking and encourage others to quit....
Why do Americans keep falling for the Democrat and Republican scare mongering and propaganda?
Is it due to what we eat, our social media, the alphabet propaganda machine (most likely)?...
News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week [via australia@aussie.zone] (www.theguardian.com)
The Data Local team uses AI technology to generate stories on weather, fuel prices and traffic reports for hyperlocal mastheads....
App Store to require developers to describe why their apps use certain APIs (9to5mac.com)
FTC readies lawsuit that could break up Amazon (www.politico.com)
A case would be a high-water mark for FTC Chair Lina Khan who gained prominence criticizing the company’s dominance.
Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed...
Rudy Giuliani concedes he made 'false' statements about Georgia election workers (www.nbcnews.com)
The Trump ally's acknowledgment came in a filing Tuesday related to the 2020 election workers' lawsuit about baseless claims of fraud that he made against them.
Why would you use a virtual assistant?
As most of the Lemmy users are security/privacy minded, after a question about alternative voices I’m wondering. Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly? (Especially when you don’t need to due to other limitations)...
Twitter is now X as the little blue bird disappears (www.theverge.com)
Twitter is transforming into X, as the site’s former bird logo has now been replaced by an official new X logo. Elon Musk, who owns the transformed social media site, began signaling the change early Sunday morning with a series of tweets, starting with one that said, “and soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and,...
Apple says it would remove iMessage and FaceTime in the UK rather than break end-to-end encryption (9to5mac.com)