also note the hospital system is extremely paranoid about data management and probably wouldn’t allow a pcp to have mri data on a laptop. even specialists seem to only review mri on hospital desktops.
Which cost me a fortune once when I plugged my phone into laptop to charge (before free global roaming). Dropbox had been blocked for a week, suddenly a flurry of sms arrived (out of order). I’d spent £250 in 3 minutes.
I feel for you. Why would you allow laptop traffic to be routed through the phone though? At least in iOS plugging the phone for charging or backup does not automatically tether.
my personal pet theory is that china could in principle block whatever they wanted, but, decide instead to block only sometimes and with some random noise thrown in, if only to impose a tax or cost on trying to connect out but to have some plausible deniability on not having it be impossible while still retaining the option of turning the dial to 11 if/when need be.
i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)
if nothing else, one has to give the ruling coalition credit for debugging the vaunted constitutional system. maybe the winning argument for the opposition will be to amend away all the vulnerabilities that were just exploited.
The US political system isn't code, it's rich vs. poor. It only pretended to be "democratic" and "moral" for 250 years because the propaganda and triumphalism held more or less, but now it's reduced to a depraved, tin pot dictatorship because of slowly increased corruption due to uncorrected weaknesses even Kurt Gödel identified that were never addressed because the rich/powerful benefited from them.
It's also wishful thinking to suppose a corrupt, weak Congress would ever do anything to limit their own corruption. John McCain discovered there was zero appetite for reform.
It would take the sustained, coordinated efforts of many ~millions of people to peacefully* overthrow and reform a system which is entirely corrupt and unwilling to work for anyone not rich/powerful. Instead, at present, American voters are far too uninformed, uneducated, divided-and-conquered and/or demoralized in red/blue team bullshit factions to clearly characterize the situation they are in and the most correct response(s) to it. There will be no "progressive resurgence" through political means, but there could be corporate James Carville->Ezra Klein pseudo-progressive swing to the pretend, corporate left fronted by another wife cheater, Republican Lite (tm) like Gavin Newsom. Nothing will change.
* Those with the power will abuse it and direct illegality towards their enemies just like every dictator does. The hope is that extreme, excessive measures taken against peaceful people weakens their pillars of support. It doesn't always as in the cases of the Bonus Army, Occupy, or about 90% of peasant uprisings. Viet Nam and Gaza Hostage protests similarly also weren't effective enough.
i make a code analogy because i believe the US was intended as a country of ideas and laws and systems, as opposed to the legacy of arbitrary ruling classes and colonial extraction that it separated itself from. pessimistically one might worry there is simply no system of governance that can scale to this size population and still espouse the stated core values. optimistically one hopes that we could be just a few amendments away from a more perfect union that takes into account technology and mechanisms of communication like x/twitter etc that can allow a single person with access to sufficiently large capital reserves to interpose themselves between the people and their elected representatives.
That was the marketing on the side of the tin 250 years ago, but that's utopian thinking.
The problem isn't the size or nature of government or the size of the population, it's that an embarrassingly under-educated populace can be manipulated into giving away their rights and freedoms to incompetent, corrupt morons. Neither direct democracy nor communism work and will never work at any large scale. What needs to happen is to give up on the false fantasy of "freedom of choice" and shift towards public administration through sortition. Throw away political parties, career politicians, PACs, billionaires, and Hobson's choice voting that doesn't matter to be replaced with limited duration "jury duty". Also, a fourth actual co-equal branch of government to audit and check the other 3 appears necessary given the Gödel's loophole-like weaknesses that have been exploited in a era with handheld mass broadcasting and generative LLMs that can create entirely fake media potentially manipulating millions into committing atrocities.
That's not going far enough. Disneyland should make its IP available to any competing ride vendor for free (sorry, not free, $99/yr) so that they too can build the same special effects people come to expect from Disneyland.
How dare you assert that Disneyland is working for free in such a scenario?
$99/yr is clearly a fair and reasonable compensation to license all Disney IP for any purpose because Disney has an eleventy bajillion percent margin on ticket sales.
for the sake of debate: if androland is available across the way, must disneyland provide skybridges so its guests can immediately leave its own attractions and frequent its competitors’ instead?
Disney owns the land and their intellectual property, Apple does not and should not own devices and software they already sold. Especially not by imposing artificial software restrictions.
i’m not a fan of apple, but they do build and own their IP and i respect their right to license it on terms they decide. Is it not expropriating them to suddenly say “mighty fine business you made there mister, your competitors who happen to be our citizens would like a piece of that so how about you just hand over some chunks of it so nothing bad should happen to the rest of it?”
Their rights to license stuff they sell should not be unlimited, that's the entire point.
I understand that your second sentence refers to the fact, that the limitation is only in EU. Businesses have to respect local laws. Laws often mentioned in the thread (DMA, GDPR, although we can only suspect that these are the reasons for this lock) apply equally to everyone who wants to do business in Europe. If Apple does not want to respect these laws, they are free to leave. Even better, they can make changes to their devices that work only in EU and leave it as it already is in other countries. Said "competitors" do not necessarily need to be EU citizens, I'm sure many US companies would use that opportunity too.
Local regulations are not foreign to Apple, apparently similar laws are in force in Japan.
As for "some chunks" - interfaces are not protected by copyright, even in the US. Assuming DMA is the problem, nobody is asking for Apple to release details of their implementation, just for them to remove artificial software restrictions that lock apps from other vendors from doing (a small subset!) of stuff only Apple can do.
Smartphones are general computing devices. Apple and Google are a duopoly in the smartphone market, while restricting what users can do with their devices more than Microsoft ever restricted what Windows users can do with Windows. If we continue allowing these companies to go in that direction, we will end up with computers that are as limited as game consoles are, Apple and Google will be the only beneficiaries of that situation.
i agree that to operate in a country (or block of countries) a company must be prepared to respect even the unjust laws. which apple has obviously been willing to do all day long in many parts of the world.
in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.
in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors.
there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.
I don't find the laws unjust in any way. Apple did everything they could to take half of the smartphone market, and to me it's totally understandable that the EU government may want to limit their power over this market.
> in this case, it really seems to me like the EU is harming consumers who benefit from the coherently-designed, safe (as compared to androland) walled garden in favor of some fairly overtly xenophobic power play against incumbents local champions cannot compete with on the merits. IMO this type of action directly invites retaliation against European companies and interests abroad.
Apple consumers will still be able to benefit from this amazing walled garden by choosing not to buy non-Apple devices. Other consumers will be able to choose other vendors that will be able to fully interoperate with Apple devices. I don't see any loses for current Apple consumers.
As for the retaliation. Maybe. Remains to be seen. Introducing any regulations brings risk.
> in the related cases of airdrop interop and alternate stores, it is certainly being required that apple release its proprietary IP to competitors
What proprietary IPs?
> there are plenty of hungry competitors in the smartphone market beyond apple and google including Samsung huawei and scores of others.
In terms of operating systems you have these two. I don't think Huawei counts, aren't they sanctioned still? Harmony OS has a very small share in EU either way.
consumers are harmed because Apple is forced to build in a way that expands its qa surface to include hypothetical tbd third-party integrations thus worsening their products, and surely opening up to more fines by the same EU who set them up like this in the first place.
those who stand to benefit from unjust laws are rarely the ones who acknowledge their nature.
in your previous response you seem to claim that samsung is an insignificant player in the smartphone market, and that integrating third-party app stores doesn’t require divulging security-related IP so i’m going to drop the mic right here.
i recognize freedom (especially as it relates to commerce) is a social construct and therefore has limits defined by society. At the same time, it does seem like in this instance at least the EU wants to have it both ways: ie it wants to be seen as operating on high-minded “principles” yet be allowed to justify fairly transparently self-interested industrial policy actions under the guise of “protection from monopolists”.
Which domestic competitors do you see them favoring with this industrial policy? Sennheiser might be the only European headphone manufacturer of consequence and I doubt they have this kind of pull.
i wasn’t intending to say that the regulations favor a specific current competitor but rather that they are intended to force apple to build in a way that favors a certain kind of potential competitor who can only operate in Europe. from a pure engineering perspective i think it’s fairly well-established that if you design, build, and test for a limited set of deployment conditions you end up with a higher quality product. which bit of wisdom apple has used decade after decade to deliver systems that delight end-users who do not relish the idea of mixing and matching and hoping the interpretation of “standards“ worked out well enough in their particular case.
seems to me this alone is a show-stopper besides all the other terrible implications:
“the best estimates show around a 10 percent false positive rate for client-side scanning – which could see a huge number of people accused of crimes they didn't commit.”
10% is massive regarless, but of what? 10% of messages being false positive flags would mean almost everyone getting flagged within a day.
Upsetting statistic for other reasons: Even if it's "10% of all flags are false, 90% are correct", if there's also no false negatives, then the 10% false positives alone gets you to about the current total incarceration rate — offenders are estimated to be a few % of the population, prison population is about 0.1% of the total population.
windbg used to offer scripting capabilities that teams could use to trigger validation of any number of internal data structures essentially at every breakpoint or watchpoint trigger. it was a tremendous way to detect subtle state corruption. and sharing scripts across teams was also a way to share knowledge of a complex binary that was often not encoded in asserts or other aspects of the codebase.
thanks for the pointers glad to hear it’s all still there
i haven’t seen this type of capability used in too many companies tbh and it seems like a lot of opportunity to improve stability and debugging speed and even code exploration/learning (did i break something ?)
in a slightly different direction: many sites also take it upon themselves to implement ip blocks. for example, us-based utility companies or healthcare companies seem to block IPs from “strategic competitor” countries (let’s say) but also from many others including supposed allies.
And it's a compliance requirement -- you are actually required to block IPs of sanctioned countries and territories.
When I argued that Google Cloud must have been blocking those already, they told me to provide some evidence (a written confirmation from GCP that they block the IPs), which is fair.
