When I had an iPhone 3GS I got in a hot tub with it in my pocket and it died. I let it dry out. Then I very carefully took it apart and found all the little white stickers inside that turn from white to pink when in contact with water. I used a razor blade to remove those stickers without damaging them. I then placed a drop of bleach on each which turned them back to white and let them dry out. I used very tiny amounts of super glue to re-apply them to the exact same positions within the phone and then very carefully reassembled the phone.
Took the phone into an Apple store. Guy disappeared into the back for about 10 minutes with it. Came back out and said it must have just up and died but he doesn’t know how and gave me a new iPhone.
Only Apple product I’ve ever owned.
Fuck you Apple.
This kind of thing is coming for Android as well once Google has converted it to it’s own walled garden bullshit.
Why not just make it a website? We’re not doing censoring yet, right?
'cause most people are tech illiterates stuck in the walled garden.
The creator used Apple (iOS) exclusive privacy features to run the service. They commented on it publicly a few times. Also why there was never an android version.
apple and the us government and ice can all suck a dick
Who could have seen this coming from the company whose CEO gifted Trump a literal gold plaque in celebration of his reelection?
Hey, you know nothing about the absurd pressure billionaire CEO’s are unde/sr
What’s objectionable about it Apple? Hmm?
They can only buy a politician so many gold statues.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here (and probably be monstrously downvoted);
ICEBlock stored the location data of all its users on Apples iCloud Servers. This the perfect target for ICE; a complete database of locations of every person who doesn’t want ICE to know where they are.
One assumption is that that Apple realised how tempting this data is to the current demonstrative administration and purged it before ICE could get their civil-liberty-abusing mitts on it.
You’re giving apple too much credit. Tim Apple literally gifted trump a golden statue. The press are reporting that this is directly in response to a request from the DOJ. This isn’t apple having a moral epiphany and thinking they’re doing ice targets a favour. Corporations don’t do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$
You’re absolutely right. Economic motivations decide the trajectory a company may take. Ethics, green washing, queer rights and other factors take a back seat. If they come with financial benefits, the company will follow that path, but that’s always because of money—no matter what the marketing material actually says.
Remember when companies were supporting sexual and gender minorities? That was because financial incentives aligned with that at the time. Remember when those turncoats suddenly scrapped the DEI programs and removed all rainbow themes? Same motivation again. Facade changed, but the foundation is still the same.
Alternate take: Tim is a businessman doing what’s best for Apple and he personally might not support Trump, but we will likely never know.
Tim Apple is a billionaire, doing billionaire things. Supporting the people who give him the most power and not giving a fuck about anyone else.
Tim Apple
I love that his has just stuck, and I don’t even blink an eye at it anymore lol.
Oh, so you’re trying to say that Tim is so greedy that he doesn’t have values at all, other than his greed? That’s an interesting position, but I think it makes him sound even worse than the previous one.
You don’t succesfully run big corporations by having high moral standarts, this was never an argument. Argument was about what makes businessman a good business man, and one major thing is seizing opportunities and “playing” important people like Trump. I don’t think he’s anywhere as (morally) bad as Steve Jobs was, but he’s doing his job as expected.
It’s an inherent byproduct of capitalism.
If you rise to Tim Cook’s level you must be someone that is either willing to put your personal values aside or you do not have them to begin with. The growth of the company matters more and if you prioritize your values you will be filtered the moment you misalign with whatever prevents maximal growth.
Capitalism does not care about values, ethics, morals, social wellness, or anything besides growth. It is cancerous and leads to a toxic society that poisons itself and falls apart, which is literally happening
If he does he doesn’t have morals to care about acting on his values as such they are more or less irrelevant.
Same take my friend. I agree - Tim’s personal politics are kinda irrelevant in this context. Best for apple=compliance with whoever is in charge so they get to keep their money printer.
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Or they removed it to keep up the appearance that it wasn’t actually a honeypot to begin with.
Something worth noting, if you are using iCloud, advanced data protection is your friend. Apple doesn’t have the encryption keys, you do.
This is not on by default.
Advanced Data Protection does require all iCloud Ecosystem devices to be current.
Not every person can afford the latest and greatest.
It requires iOS 16 and MacOS 13.
The devices that max out at those operating systems are 9 and 10 year old.
Current or on a current OS?
Edit: I just enabled it and I have a iPhone 11 on my iCloud account.
So, just latest OS.
Which Apple gives you basically forever instead of maybe a year of old updates with android.
Money is always the answer with these “people”.
To assume otherwise is to feed the beast
Oh no
Was likely a honeypot the whole time…
Was this ever even available to non-US accounts? Was there ever an explanation for why it was georestricted?
ICE is objectionable… did they got “confused”?
remember when Tim Apple gifted tRump a golden statue? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Yeah, but are Apple users going to punish Apple for glazing Trump’s tiny manhood by not buying Apple products?
Tim Apple certainly doesn’t think so.
It’s really not that bad a compromise, as far as bribes go. Some cheap gaudy bauble as payment for not interfering with billions of dollars in business?
It’s still a bribe and it’s still encouraging mango mussolini, but very efficient tradeoff
I mean I’m doing my best to only buy second hand iPhones and replace them 5-10 years. The power of Apple is the reoccurring revenues of software and the new phone buyers
I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.
objectionable contentSheer fucking cowardice
From the heroes who bravely took away the headphone jack
Apps are just browsers that can only visit one website. Who cares about them?
And websites are just little programs you can download at will, so who cares about them?
A lot of websites have server side programs taht are never downloaded by the client. So there is a pretty big difference there. Basically if you want a subversive anti-government “app” you really want a website, not an app.
Wait, where are you seeing a difference between that and how an app functions? Right now it feels like you’re abstracting a bit too far in order to make a point, but I’m (genuinely) deeply curious what you mean.
Most apps are a packaged browser that makes proprietary API calls over https. However there is nothing proprietary or valuable in the app itself, except possibly some key material for authentication of the app with the back-end.
Then depending on the user making various requests a middle-ware program will interact with the backend database and retrieve the results back to the user. The database is the valuable part and other then the specific query the user is making, nothing else is can be retrieved by the user. Normally the middle ware isn’t even downloadable either.
That’s how everything (edit: that doesn’t benefit from locally hosted resources, which have exceptions for things like gaming where rapid data access is more important than structural niceties) works, its a design paradigm called MVVM. Host the database, shift processing to the user’s hardware (excepting hardware dependent tasks like LLMs or other compute heavy tasks). Websites, apps, even firmware – essentially anything that makes an API call in some way uses this basic structure. Even entirely local applications do it this way (albeit internally).
Yes. Hence my initial claim that apps are worthless, and shouldn’t be used if you can use a website instead. So the whole idea of Apple or Android being able to remove the “iceblock” app, shows that the app was ill-conceived to begin with. Or possibly it was even a honey-pot since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website.
since apps do have much greater access to the parent device then a website
I’m not disagreeing at all that this should have had a website as a backup, but you yourself are making some really good points about how apps aren’t the same thing as websites and the benefits to using an app in this situation. Leveraging user hardware without the intermediate layer of a brower’s sandbox is good for performance and makes a site much more robust in the face of things like DDOS, and having locally-hosted resources with which the user can interact without requiring an active TCP connection (because for example: ICE has geoblocked connectivity at one of their “enforcement actions” - but you can still document what’s happening and the app will automatically-and-without-user-interaction upload what you’ve given it once connectivity is restored) is an incredibly important feature.
Offline websites, while potentially able to exhibit similar behavior, rely on extremely hacky workarounds and cached data to be able to do it - and an app is a much less volatile way to store that data than relying on your browser’s cache reintegration (which will often be dumped if you’re hit with bad a DHCP config).
I think your spirit is in the right place, but you’re missing enough of the technical nuance that it’s really undermining your ability to convincingly make your point. And again, I 100% agree that not having alternative access to this service is a critical loss.
Walled garden = poop town
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A necessary step for chat control i guess
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