Article says you cannot side load books on Apple Books. That is incorrect. You just send an epub to books via the share menu on Mac or iOS and it loads it. Also syncs it via iCloud if you want it to.

Perhaps the author meant you cannot download purchased books off of Apple Books.

The article points out France, Finland, Argentina.

You can get a pass till July 2025 by creating/setting a registry key that they made for businesses.

Paste this in a .reg file and double click it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome]
"ExtensionManifestV2Availability"=dword:00000002

I’m surprised and happy that SUSE is still doing well. I have fond memories of using SUSE in the enterprise especially around their “perfect guest” campaign for using it in virtualized environments. I thought they had very well-baked integration with large Windows networks—things just worked out of the box that didn’t with RHEL. I’m sure a lot has changed in the last decade but I appreciated their cooperative stance in the enterprise.

I would feel that it would be a reasonable if it was my local paper running the story. Arstechnica IS a primarily technical news site—I believe they should have a higher bar—otherwise they are just parroting a report and not providing useful (to me) news.

I generally think arstechnica.com does a decent job of being a non-garbage news site. I pay a couple bucks a month for the ad-free RSS feed. This story feels terrible to me. I don’t doubt a law suit has been filed, but I would expect some investigation by the reporter of the extra-ordinary claims of privilege escape the application is claimed to be capable of.

I use Adguard, vinegar and baking soda, but wasn’t aware of Wipr. I might give it a try as a replacement for Adguard. Glad you mentioned it.

I’m not an Apple apologist, but I feel there are some things Apple does that are privacy focused.

• The ability to E2EE encrypt iCloud is a very simple privacy feature that is accessible to the technical and non-technical alike.
• Private relay provides a double VPN architecture that doesn’t cause constant captcha hell and again just works for non-technical people.
• Hide my email, while not being perfect, is a pretty straightforward method to make throwaway email addresses.

The things I hate about Apple are generally not privacy related.

• They are a mega-corporation that stifles innovation
• They don’t allow other browsers
• They are puritanical about what is allowed in the App store

I really enjoy Apple products, but this is my biggest peeve. It’s not like I cannot manage without a different browser—certainly about half of americans primarily use Safari—but the flexibility and customization of Firefox or chromium would be very welcome.

I’ve moved to WinPE for its immutability.

Most Apple services can be encrypted including iCloud. Basically email and calendaring are not covered.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#advanced

If you set it up as “advanced” then only you hold the recovery keys.

If you have an easy way to make emails on the fly like Apple’s hide my email feature then it really isn’t an issue to setup accounts with unique email addresses. Some sites don’t allow throw away emails from some providers, but I’ve never had that issue with Apples version since a ban on icloud.com emails would eliminate too many customers.

I have Server 2022 with a GUI installed on my laptop because it lets me use all the server features, play Windows games that use DRM and not spend time messing around with getting linux to run on a laptop. I have Linux on the laptop, but running inside VMs.

I still don’t want copilot installed. I can confirm it is installed on my Windows Server 2022 laptop. I don’t see any entry points on the desktop or start menu. I haven’t checked Edge yet.

I wonder if copilot is released to all update channels or if it is only on a subset?

I don’t even see a link. Though I guess I should look inside Microsoft Edge.

Edit: I cannot find anyway to get to it in either the desktop or Edge. I do not have a signed in Microsoft account on this machine, so that may be why I don’t see it. I’m not willing to sign in to see.

Surprisingly, I thought the article was a reasonable summary of the actual paper. I think some people might think this was a poke at privacy on Apple, but it really focused on how hard it is to create accessible settings despite the enormous number of options.

I have found that navigating the menus in Apple iOS is quite a bit easier than on my Android devices. Mac seems more difficult as the settings tend to be inside the individual apps and don’t surface as well through the search.

The paper hammered home the point that Siri configurations were particularly hard, but they also mention that Siri data is end-to-end encrypted. I thought all those points were fair.

I do believe settings need to be improved, but I have little faith they will ever be useful for 99% of users who will simply never change anything from the default. At this point I believe any meaningful improvements for the majority of users will come from useful defaults that include E2E encryption on basically all user data. I feel Apple is coming close with iCloud Advanced Data Protection that was introduced last year, but that needs to become a default. Maybe it cannot though—too many users will lose all their data and then the trade off of security to convenience will not be worthwhile.

I don’t think a big business should have an advantage over a small business that cannot afford that technology while using public airwaves. A better solution imo would be to prioritize all very low-bandwidth traffic.

109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?

I agree that decrypt/encrypt is bad—it is simply not E2EE. The solution would have to be a better method of public key distribution for ‘federated’ systems.

While I don’t know anything specific about facebook messenger, E2EE doesn’t necessarily preclude what you suggest. A messaging service could store the entire chat history encrypted without decryption keys. When you get a new client you could restore the entire history in encrypted form onto your device. You would then use a recovery key you would possess to decrypt the message history on your end. At no time would the messaging service have the keys to decrypt. I’m not saying that is what facebook does.

Why do you need to control both ends for E2EE? Both ends need a public and private key to encrypt and decrypt messages. You need a method of key exchange. I would prefer to have an offline method (phone call, in-person) of validating a key (like iMessage and Signal have). But I don’t see a reason to need to control both ends.

It could be they are collecting and hiding the data, but what they publicly disclose they have certainly varies. My de-google-fication really started when I used google takeout (like the OP here). Excluding things I wanted backed up (e.g. photos), Google still had more than a GB of textual data (this was 7 years ago or so—my memory may be wrong). I use Apple a lot so I went to their “takeout” page. They had a few MB of data pretty much all of which I considered innocuous. I don’t think they are equivalent.

I do agree Facebook probably collects as much data as Google, but I gave that up long ago.