This seems like a disingenuous whataboutism. You are free to not use Steam as a publisher. You can use Epic/GOG or choose to self-host. The biggest advantage of Steam is the convenience of payments, marketing and infrastructure. If that is not an attractive option for you, you can skip it.
This option is not available for iOS at all and is quite limited on Android.
The article seems to cover both sides of the argument fairly and nails the concerns over Apple's on-device scanning:
> If governments had previously asked Apple to analyze people’s photos, the company could have responded that it couldn’t. Now that it has built a system that can, Apple must argue that it won’t.
This happens in North Indian states as well where the state governments have gotten extremely trigger happy with cutting off internet access for trivial reasons like student exams. It’s extremely frustrating and makes me wonder how people keep voting the same morons (I’m sorry but I do not have a charitable word for them) back into power.
I generally agree, but this doesn't work in countries that restrict cross border movement of their own citizens.
North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent to other countries. Europe loses talent to the United States. It's a flawed comparison, but North Korea is not a better place to work and do business than Europe, which this comparison would imply.
> North Korea neither gains talent from abroad nor loses talent to other countries.
It does. Nobody defects to North Korea, but there are thousands of North Korean refugees in the west. That should tell us something. Same thing for Cuba. Their inflow to outflow ratio is 0 (nobody wants in).
> Europe loses talent to the United States.
Net loss, but looking at the ratio it's still > 0 (some people move from the US to EU, just less than the other way around). So something like 1/4 (one person moving into the EU for 4 moving to the US).
if I wanted to rule without opposition I might take steps to drive away or suppress the intelligentsia, so I'm not sure what your metric is really measuring, maybe effectiveness of my tyranny?
Ah yes, the evergreen complaint in Indian politics. No matter how bad the current government is, it’s supporters will claim the alternative is worse. Even when tens of thousands of people were dying because of COVID, people like this would say “abe librandu (hey libtard), if not Modiji then who?”
Such people missed the obvious answer - the other side might not be perfect but anyone is better than someone who boasted about hosting the largest crowds he had ever seen … during a pandemic.
That's the issue in many (or most?) countries' politics.
Rather than focus on the issues, just keep shouting about how bad the other side would've been if they had been in power.
Somehow, UK tories always found a way to make it Corbyn's fault. Trump ads showed pictures of Trump's america, claiming that's what would happen under Biden.
It's literally the easiest scare piece you can write.
Yes, it's bad, but IMAGINE HOW BAD IT WOULD BE IF THEY WERE IN CHARGE.
Regardless of who THEY is, the people who will respond to those ads will do the actual legwork of filling in all the awful gaps in what could be happening.
It's ridiculous that it works, but it really seems to be effective.
Creating an enemy is politics 101 and routinely used by people of all walks of life. It's the easiest way not only to excuse your low performance, which is suddenly made to look good by comparison, but will also keep the people busy with worrying about that "larger evil" while you do your thing. Sets a low bar and distracts you from real issues.
The opposition would have crippled the country even worse, that other country violates human rights far more egregiously, and that other plumber would have needed even more attempts to get that "paranormal" leak fixed.
Nobody else will run, because by not being a career politician it means you didn't curate your life to be devoid of different random criticism from people just looking to derail your ambitions and character on the inter/national spotlight.
I'm not even remotely a BJP supporter, as my comment history will attest to.
The union government's Covid response has been spectacularly bad, anyone who argues otherwise is a brainwashed idiot.
If INC was in government some of the more megalomaniacal screwups might have been avoided. Lockdown wouldn't have been announced just hours before it went into effect for example.
However, I don't see the overall results being much better. Be it Sanghis, Commies, Congressis or any flavour of regional satraps, I can't think of a single state government that actually did a halfway decent job.
I never claimed it was false. I said it’s not entirely true. I think like most states, Kerala has a lot of misplaced pride, and fail to see that their politicians are similarly problematic. Just like the common criticism of BJP, they too neglected COVID policies during voting periods.
By pretty much any metric Kerala handled the pandemic better than other states. It’s worth looking at the material interests behind narratives. British imperialism (as export of capital at usury rates) is still heavily invested in India and communists winning in other states would threaten profits.
The CPI (M) can hardly be compared to the BJP, they’re complete opposites.
Nobody is saying the metrics are identical, nor the parties. I’m saying that politicians are fallible, and commit similar injustices to their citizens. I believe it’s crucial to have a nuanced discussion where any side is criticized for their shortcomings.
From the Hindu, a decidedly anti-BJP, left news org:
“Political exigencies also led the government to deliberately delay conducting a serosurveillance study till local body poll results were out”.
It still looks to me like comparing minor flaws to active state oppression and neglect. “Both sides” arguments imply some sort of equivalence which the outcomes don’t support in this case.
> British imperialism (as export of capital at usury rates) is still heavily invested in India and communists winning in other states would threaten profits.
Imperialism as a stage of capitalism is alive and well. Rich countries remain rich by extracting wealth from poor countries, generally in the form of exporting capital to exploit cheap labour.
Communists are anti-imperialists and if elected in all of India would fight against British (and US and Western European) exploitation. The British state propaganda arm would of course be opposed to communists in India, so as to not threaten the profits of the British ruling class.
> it would be a cesspool like the Google play store
I would suggest you use an Android smartphone from the last 5 years before making a comment like this.
I use both iOS and Android devices on a regular basis and both the App Store and Play Store are cesspools. I would go even further and say that the App Store is more obnoxious in that it serves me a half page ad whenever I search for an app.
At least on Android, I have the choice to not use the Play Store. That is not even possible when I use iOS.
Can you please explain how Apple’s Find My is anonymous while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My collects device location information through other iPhones and then upload them to Apple’s cloud where it can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers.
In the case of Amazon, they state that all the device information being relayed through your device is encrypted and capped at 80kbps.
I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.
Sidewalk is carrying all kinds of data from other users. You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will. The encryption stops you from snooping like any other TLS traffic, but Amazon itself is the receiver on the other end. And it piggybacks on your own internet connection - 80Kbps is a huge amount of data.
Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.
> You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will.
s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.
The article you just linked is about an exploit that allows you to propagate arbitrary data through the Airtag network, which is the exact opposite of knowing what goes into an Airtag message.
Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?
I wouldn't like if I would specifically keep my Samsung Smart TV offline because Samsung themselves advice not to talk about sensitive things in front of the telly [0], and then finding out that it did go online, via my neighbor's helpful Alexa... No thank you.
Maybe not, but as always it comes down to trust. And I trust Apple to be more diligent with my iPhone's AirTag locating capabilities than Amazon is with their ability to help any device get online.
Amazon makes things cheap and easy but not always in ways agree with.
As a counter Example, Canonical got some critique with their "telemetry in the installer", but if you ask me, they did it in the nicest way possible: They told everyone that they want some data to focus developers' efforts where it counts and they let me inspect the json object I was about to send them, so I trust them and sent it to them with a smile.
In all fairness, there are several ways to transmit arbitrary information on the AirTag protocol. The overall reason why people trust Apple with Airtags/Find My is because they're too big to fail. Everyone has already come to terms with the fact that iCloud owns their photos, iTunes owns their music... what's the difference if they also have your location data?
I agree with this, but I'd add that if you have already trusted Amazon enough to purchase and run 24/7 with full access to your home network their remotely controlled and configured internet microphone, drawing the line at this feature seems a little odd to me.
If you own an Echo device and used it prior to this feature you had already granted a large degree (relative to this feature) of trust to Amazon anyway. It reminds me a little of people who swear they will never use an Echo device due to concerns about eavesdropping but happily carry an internet microphone equiped smartphone everywhere.
Thanks, that makes sense. Eventually, it does come down to trust then. I was under the impression that there was a technical reason as to why Amazon Sidewalk is worse than Find My.
1) A big thing is trust - people trust Apple to keep their data secure much more than they trust Amazon, especially when you contrast both company's main business model.
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
Isn't it the same with airtags? Your iphone will forward data about other people's airtags as long as you have upgraded to the latest ios. You can opt-out, but you need to know about it first. Same deal I think with sidewalk.
The funny thing is - if Apple made Find My opt-in - most users would chose not to use their device for Find My, though it benefits them all and hardly has a downside.
The sheer fact of asking the user to opt-in automatically decreases opt-in rate a lot (like a LOT), even if that tech is super good. It is way easier to dismiss a dialog than to think what it even does.
I'll grant that the outrage against Sidewalk does seem to be worse, but there are at least some of us who dislike both. I have Find My turned off on my iPhone.
